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magazine for noise & politicsWed, 12 Jul 2017 10:11:02 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5Angry White People – Coming Face-to-Face with the British Far Right by Hsiao-Hung Pai (Book Review)http://datacide-magazine.com/angry-white-people-coming-face-to-face-with-the-british-far-right-by-hsiao-hung-pai-book-review/
http://datacide-magazine.com/angry-white-people-coming-face-to-face-with-the-british-far-right-by-hsiao-hung-pai-book-review/#respondFri, 30 Jun 2017 15:22:58 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4711Hsiao-Hung Pai: Angry White People Coming Face-to-Face with the British Far Right With a Foreword by Benjamin Zephaniah Zed Books, London 2016 ISBN 978-1-783606-92-4 Angry White People: Coming Face-to-Face with the British Far Right by Hsiao-Hung Pai (Zed Press, 2016) is not quite the overview of contemporary UK fascism that its subtitle suggests. The familiar […]]]>

Hsiao-Hung Pai: Angry White People
Coming Face-to-Face with the British Far Right
With a Foreword by Benjamin Zephaniah
Zed Books, London 2016
ISBN 978-1-783606-92-4

Angry White People: Coming Face-to-Face with the British Far Right by Hsiao-Hung Pai (Zed Press, 2016) is not quite the overview of contemporary UK fascism that its subtitle suggests. The familiar far-right brands of the British National Party, National Front, and their various offshoots barely figure. Instead, the main focus is on the phenomenon of the English Defence League, which seemed to have exploded out of nowhere in 2009 and over the next few years mobilised anti-Muslim street protests across England. The group still exists today, though it has lost much of its early momentum and some of its founding activists along the way.
Pai’s avowed aim is to try to understand ‘what personal and social circumstances are leading these men and women’ to join a movement ‘based on prejudices and myths’, bringing to the subject the ‘outsider’ perspective of a 1990s migrant from Taiwan who is not distracted by social niceties from asking direct and awkward questions. This includes displays of chutzpah or just plain cheek such as knocking on the door of a house flying an England flag and asking its inhabitant to explain himself and walking into the pub reputed to be the EDL’s favoured drinking hole and requesting to speak to its leader, ‘Tommy Robinson’ – real name Stephen Lennon. As a result she does secure what seem to be some fairly unguarded and revealing conversations with a number of EDL supporters, including a couple with Robinson himself.
The EDL’s carefully curated image of being a non-racist organisation simply opposed to ‘Islamic extremism’ is belied by racist remarks about Muslims in general, informed by an incoherent and paranoid world view that fears some kind of impending Muslim domination of the UK. Robinson tells her: ‘Wherever Islam is, there is a military operation to implement sharia law. This country will be exactly the same. Five per cent of the population is Muslim. When it becomes 20 per cent, that’s when there will be a war’.
Robinson struggles to explain why he feels English and not British, or to reconcile his politics with his part-Irish background. In addition to complaining about Muslims, he complains about immigration more generally and even about Welsh workers getting building work in his home town, while at the same time acknowledging that ‘Everyone in this town is an immigrant’, his family included. Meanwhile, a rank-and-file activist complains about ‘pakis’ while obsessing about his desires for ‘oriental’ women. So far, so stupid, but if the far right could be defeated by exposing their irrationality and logical inconsistency, they would have been vanquished long ago.

Luton
As Pai explains, the origins of the EDL were in the town of Luton in Bedfordshire, 30 miles north of London. It was here in 2009 that an Islamist-led protest against a parade by British troops was the spark for the so-called ‘United People of Luton’ and ‘Casuals United’ (consisting of right-wing football supporters from elsewhere) to come on to the streets for a couple of protests before giving birth to the English Defence League – though its leader Lennon/Robinson had been waiting for his moment, having organised a ‘Ban the Luton Taliban’ protest several years earlier.
It is to Luton then that the author turns her attention, where the early EDL leadership had intensely local associations with one part of the town in particular (Farley Hill) and indeed a specific kinship base, with founder Tommy Robinson’s cousin Kevin Carroll, as his deputy leader, and his uncle Darren Carroll, also an early activist.
I grew up in Luton and was involved in anti-fascist politics there when I was at school and occasionally since, so this added an additional interest to the book – as well as an informed perspective against which to judge some of its content. From a Lutonian point of view, the author gets off to a bad start by writing that ’Luton was a mystery to me. A predominantly white town… with some of the country’s worst ethnic tensions’. Thanks to the antics of the EDL and tiny groups of Jihadists, people in the town are used to it being portrayed as some kind of ‘race war’ frontline, when in fact the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants have nothing to do with either EDL or jihadists, and racism is no worse (or better) than in most places in the UK. It has been a multicultural town for many years; in fact, alongside white British people (actually only 45% of the population according to the 2011 Census), there are sizeable minorities with origins in Ireland, the Caribbean, Africa and Eastern Europe as well as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
There are some basic errors that could have been avoided if the book had been proof-read by somebody who knows the town and its history – it is simply not true, for instance, that in the notorious violence by Millwall fans at Luton Town’s Kenilworth Road football ground in 1985 ‘a police officer was kicked to death’. Maybe none of that matters to people outside of Luton, but it does somewhat undermine the book’s credibility.
Pai does at least acknowledge that while she had expected to find Farley Hill ‘a rough, white estate plagued by far-right groups’, she doesn’t have any problems on the estate finding white people to tell her that the EDL are racist and that ‘Tommy Robinson is a wanker’. But there is a sense that she has gone to the town with her own prejudices about ‘rough, white’ working class people and their predisposition to racism.

Angry white men in the 1980s
Some of the book’s more interesting content comes from Pai’s conversations with Darren Carroll, who has moved from being a prominent member of the EDL at its foundation to becoming a firm opponent of the far right. He stresses his own, and to an extent the EDL’s back story in the world of football ‘hooligan’ firms, having been very involved with Luton Town’s own football gang, the Migs (Men in Gear) in the 1980s. As he recalls, that was a period in which the National Front was trying to win support on the terraces, including turning up in Luton with visiting away fans to cause trouble.
I remember in January 1981 spending my 18th birthday standing outside a Mosque in Luton, in the predominantly Asian Bury Park area near the town’s football ground. With local Muslims and a small group of Anti-Nazi League supporters, we were there to defend it from attack by visiting football fans, as a large group of Chelsea supporters had recently attacked the Mosque, throwing bricks and leaving people injured.
Those were violent times. I was a member of the Luton Youth Movement, an anti-racist group that organised community self-defence. In May of that year, our march against racist attacks in the town centre was charged by Sieg Heiling skinheads; on the same day, a similar group of Nazi boneheads (quite probably the same group), stormed the stage and smashed up a gig by Luton punk band UK Decay in nearby Bedford.
In July 1981, it was the presence of skinheads believed to be linked to the neo-Nazi British Movement in the town centre that brought hundreds of black, white and Asian youth on to the streets for two nights of rioting in which over 100 people were arrested. This was the summer of the riots that swept through England from Brixton to Toxteth (Liverpool) and beyond. One of the more surprizing revelations in the book is that Darren Carroll was involved in the crowd squaring up to the fascists that weekend. He mentions that a group of skinheads ‘entered a cafeteria in High Town’ in Luton and that a ‘British Indian man Darren knew at school picked up a brick and threw it through the window’. I was also in that group outside the café, we had gone looking for the rumoured skinhead incursion after the police had closed down the main indoor Arndale shopping centre and moved a crowd of us outside. So I can only assume that this future EDL activist was standing very close to me on that Saturday in July 1981!
So yes, Angry White Racists are nothing new in Luton. But whereas the most violent ones in the early 1980s were generally recognisable as members of a marginal right-wing skinhead subculture, those who smashed up Asian businesses and cars during the May 2009 Luton protests that gave birth to the EDL looked just like other white working class people. In the liberal mind, it’s all too easy to reverse this observation and assume that if the EDL are predominantly white working class, then white working class people are mostly pro-EDL or at least potentially so. But is this true?
Luton is a town of over 200,000 people, with a football team which regularly attracts 8000+ local fans. Yet even at its height in 2009, the proto-EDL only managed to get 500 or so people out on the streets of the town. It is true that in 2011 an EDL demonstration in Luton attracted around 1500 people, but this was a national mobilisation with contingents coming from all over the country and indeed from elsewhere in Europe. The departure of Tommy Robinson from the EDL in 2013 weakened it nationally as well as locally, and since then it has has never mobilised more than 500 anywhere in the country. Only 12 people attended an EDL protest against an Islamic conference in Luton in December 2014.
Wannabe paramilitaries Britain First, who have taken on the mantle of the EDL as the most visible face of the far right (at least on social media), has declared Luton a target town but it has also failed to mobilise large numbers. 250 attended its national demonstration in Luton in June 2015, and its subsequent actions there have involved a handful of activists mostly from elsewhere. Earlier this year 25 Britain First supporters staged a ludicrous ‘Christian Patrol’ in Luton’s Bury Park. Despite its online presence, it has also struggled to get significant numbers out on the streets anywhere since it was founded in 2011.
In addition to a quantitative decline in numbers, there has been a qualitative change in the make-up of far right protestors since the foundation of the EDL. The early protests in Luton did attract quite a few football fans but as Darren Carroll points out, ‘they soon left, after a couple of demos’. It has always been part of the far right fantasy that football hooligans could be mobilised as its stormtroopers, but while they have occasionally made inroads, most football fans just haven’t been interested in a long term involvement with the far right, whether in the 1980s with the NF or today with the EDL.

Casual culture vs. racism?
A lot of words have been spilt on why some white working class people come to support the far right, and this book spills a few more. But perhaps more attention should be paid to the opposite – what are the protective factors in British working class culture that has prevented the far right from mobilising more than tiny numbers onto the streets at any point in the last 40 years?
In terms of football culture, one factor has been that black players have become a major part of the game. In the 1970s, black faces at a senior level were few and some hardcore racist fans jeered their own black players. Today it is hard to see how many supporters who cheer on their black heroes week in week out could seriously believe that kicking black people out of the country and reinstating some mythical ‘White Britain’ is a desirable prospect, let alone a feasible one.
At some clubs too, black fans have been an important factor, including in some of the ‘hooligan’ football firms in the 1980s and 1990s. This was certainly the case with the Migs and its youth wing, the BOLTS (Boys of Luton Town) both of which consisted of white and African-Caribbean Luton fans. In Angry White People, Darren Carroll claims that ‘The Casuals, multicultural and multiracial, took a foothold and defeated the NF’ on the terraces. If this is true, it was not so much because they were engaged in an organised anti-fascist initiative but because their very social composition was a refutation of the far right’s whites only focus. In Carrol’s account, stylistic differences also played a part. Casuals were all about wearing the correct clothes labels and attempts by far right activists to gain influence in 1980s football grounds fell short partly because they ‘didn’t quite cut the mustard with the wear, so it was a big giveaway…. It was all about who looked the smartest’.
Another feature of mainstream working class casual culture has been its engagement with black music. It is misleading to talk of ‘white working class’ culture, as many white working class people in Luton and elsewhere from the 1970s onwards were serious soul boys and girls, hanging out with black friends in clubs and holiday camp festivals (most famously the Caister Soul Weekender). Pai mentions 1980s Luton football casuals hanging out at ‘The Mad Hatters, a notoriously ‘rough’ nightclub’. This was a place I went to sometimes (later renamed Club M), and it would be wrong to see it as a spawning ground for far right activism. It was a racially mixed club playing soul/funk/r’n’b, later with an indie room upstairs.
From the early 1990s, it was the rave/free party scene that brought people together, including the Luton-based Exodus Collective who put on huge parties and festivals that tens of thousands of people took part in, dancing to reggae-infused drum’n’bass in particular. Exodus fell apart in 2001, but its successor Leviticus Sound System picked up the baton. I went to one of their parties in 2011 at the Carnival Arts Centre in Luton, where a crowd of White UK, African-Caribbean and Asian people partied together to reggae in one room and drum’n’bass in the other. The following year, Leviticus were at the heart of the ‘We are Luton’ demonstration, playing tunes at the start of the counter protest of around 1,000 people to the EDL’s 500 strong march in the town.
Liking black music is not a vaccine against racism, nor is cheering black footballers, but these factors, not to mention having black friends in clubs, at work, or on the terraces, do undermine the appeal of a ‘Whites Only UK’ traditionally pushed by the far right. Of course it could be argued that the presence of these factors shaped the precise form of anti-Muslim racism that emerged with the EDL. South Asian people were less involved in football and casual culture, so they were easier to frame as the threatening other in the post 9/11 world. In the early days of the EDL, much was made of the fact that a handful of black faces turned out on their protests, and ‘a black and white unite and fight the Muslims’ coalition is theoretically plausible. But even if some black people shared the British nationalist/pro-army/anti-Muslim ideology of the EDL, they were unlikely to hang around for very long in a scene with such a strong whiff of racism.
Perhaps more to the point, the obvious racism attached to the EDL (despite its claims to the contrary) discouraged many potentially sympathetic white people from getting actively involved. As Darren Carroll puts it, ‘You just couldn’t go on those demos and come back to tell your black mates all about it’.

Anti-fascists and Radical Islamists
Other than some discussion of football, Pai doesn’t really explore these musical/cultural factors at all, and in terms of opposition to the EDL, she relies more or less exclusively on reproducing statements from the Socialist Workers Party-led Unite Against Fascism. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not least because it ignores other approaches to combating the far right from broader-based local community initiatives to more militant anti-fascism as well as exaggerating the success and impact of the UAF. The latter have often been more successful at branding demos involving other groups with their placards than with mobilising large numbers in their own right (see for instance report of the anti-EDL demonstration in Tower Hamlets in 2013 in Datacide 13).

Pai also seems to share the SWP perspective of not criticising Islamist organisations and dismissing out of hand any parallels between the EDL and the pro-Jihadist fringe. If the EDL are to be rightly criticized for arguing that most Muslims in Britain share the views of radical Islamists, the author similarly fails to make this distinction clear. She meets Anjem Choudary, founder of Al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK, and presents him as an entirely reasonable anti-war campaigner who has been maligned by ‘the British media’ as a ‘hate preacher’. This is a man long involved in groups associated with anti-Semitism, homophobia and the glorification of mass murderers like Islamic State and the 9/11 hijackers.

In modern multicultural Britain, the far right comes in many forms. While the white right pose the most immediate threat in terms of racism on the streets, radical Islamists or for that matter extreme Hindu nationalist groups share the classic fascist tropes of obsession with militarism, social purity and the nation (or in the case of radical Muslims, the surpra-national caliphate). In places where these groups have more influence they pose a violent threat to religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, and to secular/leftist dissenters – as witnessed most recently in the assassination of secularist bloggers in Bangladesh.

Within the UK these groups are less of a threat, other than the not insignificant threat posed by some of their supporters plotting to bomb trains, planes, and nightclubs. But to the extent that they are able to attract disenfranchised and disenchanted (mostly) young people, they function in exactly the same way as the EDL in channeling discontent with the status quo into the reactionary dead end of right wing communalist politics. In a different context, Choudary and co. could no doubt find common ground with the likes of Paul Golding, leader of Britain First, who sounds just like a ‘hate preacher’ when he says ‘We don’t want to live in a filthy, immoral society’ (as quoted in the book).

EDL and fascism
One question that is touched on in the book, if not fully explored, is the relationship between the EDL and groups with roots in the more established neo-nazi scene. Throughout its short history, the EDL has been subject to conflicts internal and external with factions such as the North West Infidels, the South East Alliance and the Racial Volunteer Force, as well as with the British National Party.

If this has been in part a tactical question of not wanting to be seen associating with out-and-out Nazis, it is also true that the EDL and perhaps Britain First do represent an attempt to steer the far right in a new direction. Groups like the NF and BNP have their origins in the Mosleyite pro-Hitler/fascist milieu of the 1930s and 1940s. A large component of this is a racialized hyper-nationalism with a strong thread of white supremacism and anti-Semitism.

For reasons discussed above, a pure-white British nationalism is unlikely to be viable in the 21st century, but there is clearly plenty of scope for a right-wing, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim movement that stops short of calling for the ‘repatriation’ of all black people, most of whom were born here anyway. This is the political ground that the EDL has tried to occupy along with its allies, such as the British Freedom Party – a short lived split from the BNP which sought to position itself as the political wing of the EDL’s street mobilisations.

This is where the alignment with the ‘Counter-Jihad’ far right comes in. Pushing an agenda of defending western civilisation from Islamic takeover, these fantasists imagine they are refighting the crusades – one of the movement’s key blogs ‘Gates of Vienna’ takes its name from the defeat of Muslim Ottoman empire forces at the siege of Vienna in 1683 and claims ‘We are in a new phase of a very old war’. In this worldview, Muslims rather than Jews are the main enemy and there can even be space for supporting Israel as an outpost of Western values (though in some versions, the Jews still get the blame for bringing in the Muslims as part of a conspiracy to impose multiculturalism!). While plainly racist in their depiction of Muslims, the issue of race per se is downplayed in favour of an emphasis on Christian cultural identity.
In the early days of the EDL, much was made of the role of wealthy banker Alan Lake (real name Alan Ayling), who was accused of bankrolling the EDL and pulling some of its ideological strings. Pai gives a bizarre account of this episode, stating that ‘Lake is known as a Zionist’ for whom ‘the nascent growth of an anti-Islamic street movement in Luton gave him hope that he could develop his own pro-Israel agenda’. As Pai acknowledges, this is also the charge laid against the EDL by Nick Griffin of the BNP – that it is controlled by Zionists (which in this context effectively means Jews). It is troubling, to say the least, that the author reproduces this highly dubious claim. Israel is a powerful state with supportive allies in the British and US governments and hardly needs a few hundred EDL types on the streets to defend its interests. What Lake and others like him no doubt saw in the EDL were kindred spirits who wanted to build the far right beyond its old school neo-Nazi base. Support for the Israeli state might be part of that new far right package, but it is hardly its organising principle.

One of the problems with debating whether the EDL and other ‘Counter-Jihadists’ are fascists is that it involves measuring the contemporary far right against a template of 1930s and 40s high fascism in Italy and Germany. In the longer term, we can see that violent, racialized nationalism comes in many forms which vary over time – the modern equivalent of the NSDAP may not arrive dressed in black uniforms and swastikas.

In many ways, the EDL can be seen as the latest incarnation of a home-grown current of British loyalism to king and country that includes the early 20th century British Brothers League (who campaigned against Jewish immigration), the Anti-German League that disrupted peace meetings in the First World War and the ‘Church and King’ mobs that attacked political and religious dissenters in the late 18th century. If this is a kind of fascism, it is not a foreign ideological import but something with a long domestic history.

Brexit and the racist mainstream

The current position of the EDL and other would-be street-fighting British nationalists is fragmented and weak. Tommy Robertson’s most recent initiative was to launch Pegida UK, a British branch of the German movement ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’. It attracted only around 200 people to its first march, held in Birmingham in February 2016. Clearly Robertson has failed to learn the first lesson of far right failures in Britain – don’t be seen as German! Even at its 1970s peak, the old National Front never really escaped the charge that it was at heart unpatriotic due to its association with the ideology of Britain’s second world war military enemy.

We can certainly take some comfort in the failure to mobilise a large ongoing street presence, even if this fragmentation has its own dangers as lone wolf terrorists act out their race war fantasies. This was seen with deadly effect in the assassination of pro-migrant Labour MP Jo Cox in Leeds at the height of the EU referendum campaign in June 2016. The man charged with her murder replied “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”, when asked to give his name in court.

However organisationally weak the far right may be, the fact is that many of its ideas have moved into the mainstream of British politics. The pro-Brexit referendum vote was plainly underpinned by hostility to immigration and a diffuse sense of ‘we want our country back’. Policies associated with the EDL, the UK Independence Party and the BNP are now espoused by Government ministers. At the October 2016 Conservative Party conference, for instance, the Home Secretary discussed new anti-immigration measures including requiring companies to declare how many ‘foreign’ workers they are employing. Employers, landlords and banks are all being compelled to become immigration police, with landlords now facing prosecution for renting out homes to ‘undocumented migrants’. The Prime Minister spoke of people finding ‘themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration’ and evoked earlier anti-cosmopolitan prejudice with her statement that ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’.

Meanwhile on the streets, even the police acknowledge that there has been a large increase in racist incidents since the start of the Brexit campaign (‘Police log fivefold rise in race-hate complaints since Brexit result’, The Guardian, 30 June 2016). In the forward to Pai’s book, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah recalls being victim of a violent racist attack on the streets of Birmingham as an eight-year-old. Now it seems those days are not behind us – to give just one example, a recent report in the Luton News (21 September 2016) told of a boy walking along the road being attacked by a group of girls ‘shouting racist remarks, spitting at him and throwing stones’.

Without indulging in too much hyperbole about incipient British fascism, these are dangerous times. Clearly there is an economic dimension to all this. In a town like Luton for instance, Vauxhall motors and other engineering firms once pulled in workers ‘from Ireland, Asia and the West Indies’ as well as from across the UK, creating ‘a multicultural workforce, which reflected the ethnic composition of the town’ (Pai). The demise of such industries has taken away some of the places where workers from different backgrounds shared a common condition as well as paving the way for increasingly insecure and casualised employment conditions. Pai is right that ‘The far right… point to migration and migrants as the cause of the problem, when in fact migrants have also found themselves victims of a restructured economy and job market’.

Blaming this all on the media or the bosses is too easy – in Britain racism is deeply embedded in a culture of what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘postcolonial melancholia’, an often unspoken nostalgia for the days of ‘British greatness’, imperial prowess and apparent racial, cultural and gender certainties. It’s not hard to find white people on working class estates voicing such concerns, as Pai does, but focusing on them perhaps misses how widespread this sentiment is in other parts of society. No doubt much the same could be found in suburban golf clubs after a few drinks, but few writers and journalists venture there.

Angry White People contains some useful material, but it is a flawed account of the contemporary far right. The author poses the right questions of ‘how can these racist ideologies be challenged? If merely countering that we should celebrate cultural diversity cannot provide an effective solution, what are the possibilities for change’? But she offers little in the way of analysis or answers. Why, for instance, in the present period in Europe is so much social discontent finding expression through the radical right rather than the radical left? It is not as if left wing ideas are hidden or hard to find. Is the way some of the left operates part of the problem in its inability to relate to actual working class people rather than just the idea of them? Responding to the present period to develop an effective opposition to the far right is going to require self-critical reflection as well as action.

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/angry-white-people-coming-face-to-face-with-the-british-far-right-by-hsiao-hung-pai-book-review/feed/0Demented Idioms – Schizo-Culture: The Event (1975) & The Book (1978)http://datacide-magazine.com/demented-idioms-schizo-culture-the-event-1975-the-book-1978/
http://datacide-magazine.com/demented-idioms-schizo-culture-the-event-1975-the-book-1978/#respondWed, 28 Jun 2017 08:36:00 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4705“The problem is not really defining a political position […] but to imagine and to bring about new schemas of politicization.” – Michel Foucault Back in the late 1980s, a series of pocket books appeared introducing English speakers to several writers who would become lumped together as post-modernist or post structuralist philosophers. At the time, […]]]>

“The problem is not really defining a political position […] but
to imagine and to bring about new schemas of politicization.”

– Michel Foucault

Back in the late 1980s, a series of pocket books appeared introducing English speakers to several writers who would become lumped together as post-modernist or post structuralist philosophers. At the time, though, the names of Baudrillard, Lyotard, Virilio and Deleuze & Guattari were a lot less well known and these pocket books (dubbed the Foreign Agent Series) had the aura of underground publications. More aptly, perhaps, they seemed extra-academic; they didn’t seem to be coming from an institution and least of all from a British institution. The origins of these books, however, lay in a series of Journals and Conferences organized and edited under the name of Semiotext(e) and which came out of a specific department of Columbia University (an institutional vacuole?) One such Conference and accompanying Journal was the Schizo Culture gathering of November 1975, which brought (mainly untranslated) French theorists into collision and collaboration with elements of the SoHo Art Scene and with anti-psychiatry and prison activists like Howie Harp (Insane Liberation Front) and Judy Clark (Midnight Special). Ever mobile and shape- shifting and apposite to Semiotext(e)’s birth in a critique of linguistics1
we would find that William Burroughs (he of the ‘word virus’) was present, as was his fleetingly one-time Project Sigma collaborant, Ronald Laing.

With this publication then, we get an elegant and pricey box set containing a re-print of the wide ranging and visually ‘jarring’ Schizo Culture Journal along with a companion book gathering together some of the papers that were read at the Conference as well as a smattering of transcribed talks and discussions. Both of these volumes are introduced by Semiotext(e)’s Sylvère Lotringer through which we garner a sense of the sapiosexual excitement, logistical chaos, mutual suspicion and leftist conspiracy theory that all get their place as situating factors that feed into the remembered atmosphere around the Conference. As the original flyer states, the Conference was at pains to act as a conjunction point between the “revolution in desire” that came into focus after May 1968 and what Burroughs, speaking of the late 60s and early 70s, called the “cultural revolution of unprecedented dimension”. It’s also made clear that the “schizo” of the title did not refer to “any clinical entity, but to the process by which social controls of all kinds, endlessly re-imposed by Capitalism, are broken up and opened to revolutionary change.” There is then a pronounced influence upon the conference coming from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (which was also the theme of a Semiotext(e) Journal in 1977) as well as something of an expanded view of capitalist power relations as insidiously endocolonial and woven into the very fabric of institutions and their surrogate imposition of self-definitions.

As Lotringer puts it in his introduction to the conference, “schizo” is wielded as a word that depicts an outlook that seeks to abort or reverse the ‘birth of man (sic) as an individual’, it is wielded as a means to combat the techniques of ‘normalisation’ and open up the circuitry of Capitalist power as not solely vested in the ‘politics proper’ of a State-centrism or in the geo-political manoeuvrings that can both enrage us and castrate us : “Psychoanalysis has to do with politics, politics has to do with madness, madness has to do with creation, creation with drugs, drugs with prisons, prisons with asylums, asylums with the university, the university with Capital, and Capital with desire.” This loop sums up the field of focus that the Conference ambitiously tried to take in and to some degree it is served better by the Schizo Culture Journal than the accompanying collection of papers (many of which have appeared previously in the Semiotext(e) back catalogue.) That said, it is still something of an event to read the transcript of a panel at which both Foucault and Laing appear. The latter not only schizzes-out a new word “conditionability” when talking of the ill-effects of pharmaceutical drugs, but, as with the contributions here of Howie Harp and Judy Clark, he manages, before Foucault launches off, to maybe capture the ethos of this conference without too much discursive baggage: “A lack of feeling of and for each other is what is cultured in our society.”

If Laing points here towards a form of schizo culture that takes in a breadth of expression that, in forging links between people rather than the ideas they carry, could forge new forms of social relations, then it is as well to drift outside the Schizo Culture conference to both recall and discover collective initiatives such as Mental Patients Unions and anti-psychiatry collectives2
. Across these two books there is, then, reference to Howie Harp’s Mental Patient Liberation Project which set up a store front project in New York; there is the inclusion of The Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression; a flyer from the Network Against Psychiatric Assault announcing a conference on ‘Social Rupture and/or Social Control’; and an intriguing article documenting the institutional self critique of psychoanalysts working at the Lavans Hospital by François Peraldi (who went on to edit Semiotext(e)’s Polysexuality issue). Of the initiatives outlying the Schizo Culture conference we see, in the persons of Foucault and Deleuze, that the Group of Information on Prisons was represented as well as, with Guattari in attendance and David Cooper contributing a piece on ‘Non-Psychiatry’, the International Network for Alternatives to Psychiatry.

I mention these, albeit local and Western initiatives, as I think they lend both components of this publication an atmosphere of activist engagement and urgency. The Schizo Culture gathering does not seem to have been a somnolent procession of paper-reading Phd point grabbers (however, having said that, Felix Guattari’s suggestion to move further away from an academic format, Lotringer reports, was met by some attendees with dissension!) Yet, in another direction, the direction of ‘molecular revolution’, these initiatives could also be said to reflect what Henry Louis Gates Jr. called “politicizing the political”3
, for, outside of the categories of politics proper and its misguided search for the ‘revolutionary subject’, what we have here – with a concern for the inmates of Asylums and Prisons, with methods of control being revealed to operate at both an institutional and intimate level, at the level of procedural command and speech codes – is not just the growing absence of a wholesome and authenticatable subject, but subjects (stripped of ‘rights’) that are excluded to the degree of being prevented from accessing their own lived historicity and means of expression.

In this light, the Schizo Culture project, wary of what Guattari calls “semiotic subjugation” and what Burroughs has referred to as “word authority”, seems to attend to both a liberation of the means of expression associated with the unblocking of madness, (c.f. the “psychotic phonetics” of Louis Wolfson and the role in the conference of the counter-discursivity of music and theatre) as well as to a cautionary shedding light on the way that this semiotic subjugation can come, with tight definitional meanings and an individualising response to our enunications, to infect the groups to which we belong. Lyotard’s contribution (one which we are informed was met with a lack of enthusiasm from a Foucault and a Guattari at the back), takes this up through his discussion of ‘magisterial discourse’: “the discourse concerning that which authorizes one to say what one says.” For Lyotard such a meta-discourse and its sovereignly legitimation is often kept hidden and one could offer that it is just such a meta-discourse, the power of language and the taking of power from the high chair, that is undermined and unsettled by what David Cooper called the ‘language of madness’. However, it is often the identification of these meta-discourses (be they patriarchal right or white rites or class fight or bureaucratic wheelwrights) that, in revealing relations of power, can get you labeled as ‘mad’ in the first place.

Lyotard’s essay in the Journal is called ‘On The Strength of the Weak’ and, in however oblique a fashion, he points towards this power of the weak to expose the meta-discursive or, in more common parlance, the unspoken rules by which our communications can be confined and monitored. None feel this more than the sectioned and the sent-down and none feel more keenly the repercussions from the powers-that-be (the powers for whom state legislation is the bank of last resort.) As with the ban on literacy for Black slaves in the Southern States, so these inmates, similarly deposed from human-feeling and denied cognitive abilities, only need argue back against their diagnosis and captivity to be seen as posing a threat to the meta-discursivity of identificatory power relations that ‘absolve’ the powers-that-be (hence the random sadistic violence towards slaves in the Southern States and the continual litany of multi-institutional abuse.) For Lyotard this ‘strength of the weak’ is directed towards exposing the pedagogical legitimation of the powers-that-be, but whilst such a pedagogical control is undoubted, the inclusion of advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs and ECT and surveillance machines in the Schizo Culture Journal cast a mournful shadow over the potentialities of a strength – separated-out by diagnostic caveats – that lacks ‘force’. Maybe Lyotard is caught in his own meta-discourse (that of Philosophy) as the transcription of his session at the Conference records one member of the audience as saying “Could you give some examples of what kind of actions could be used in a practical way [so as] to turn the discourse against itself.” The Emperor’s new clothes?

So, when one turns to David Cooper’s contribution to the Journal one can read, in a passage descriptive of his hopes for the International Network for Alternatives to Psychiatry, how the strength of the weak can be made powerful: “… through a form of meeting, the person can see how repression is concretely mediated to him or her by the institutions in which his existence is embedded. People thus re-appropriate the power [they] invested in the abstract system and growing potent they see the impotence of the system.” Perhaps the Schizo Culture conference figured (or could have figured) as an impromptu meeting of the Network which held several, not unrelated, conferences from the mid 70s4. Whether or not that could be the case is maybe just to make my own fantasy links (as would be the desire to see Franz Fanon and Hussein Bulhan there), when it’s probably more discursively correct (!) to suggest that the conference, as with much of the publishing activity of Semiotext(e), was important to many in that it pronounced in favour of ‘new schemas of politicisation’. Maybe, as with the Polysexuality anthology (also reissued), it is the case that the inclusion of the ‘psyche’ in politics – the inclusion of myth, ritual, projection, introjection, social fantasies, group dynamics, imaginaryness etc. – can only come, at present and before the arousal of ‘abreaction associations’, through a practice of culture, living culture, de-institutionalised culture, de-egoic culture, schizo-culture … that precipitates, as Fanon suggested, an occult instability.June 2016

1 Guattari described his own similar project as “corroding the linguistic edifice from within”. See The Machinic Unconscious, Semiotext(e), 2011.

2 An incredible overview of mental health legislation across the ages (focusing mainly on the UK) together with a detailed history of the resistance to it can be accessed at http://studymore.org.uk/mhhtim.htm

4 As with Frantz Fanon’s clinical work at Blida-Joinville, there is minimal information available about this Network. Aside from Cooper and Guattari, others involved, as far as I can find out, include Franco Basaglia (Italy), Maria Langer (Argentina), Monny Elkaïm (Belgium), Robert Castel (France), Yves-Luc Conreur (Belgium), Anne Lovell (USA).

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/demented-idioms-schizo-culture-the-event-1975-the-book-1978/feed/0Datacide at the Radical Bookfair, London June 24http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-at-the-radical-bookfair-london-june-24/
http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-at-the-radical-bookfair-london-june-24/#respondSat, 24 Jun 2017 09:31:48 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4701Datacide is participating at the London Radical Bookfair June 24 with a stall!]]>

Datacide is participating at the London Radical Bookfair June 24 with a stall!

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-at-the-radical-bookfair-london-june-24/feed/0EAT LIKE AN IDEALIST! – the ASSASSIN association of musical marxists reader (Book Review)http://datacide-magazine.com/eat-like-an-idealist-the-assassin-association-of-musical-marxists-reader-book-review/
http://datacide-magazine.com/eat-like-an-idealist-the-assassin-association-of-musical-marxists-reader-book-review/#respondFri, 23 Jun 2017 10:03:40 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4698EAT LIKE AN IDEALIST!1] Micheal Tencer and Andy Wilson (Ed.) the ASSASSIN association of musical marxists reader Unkant Publishers, London 2015 ISBN 978-0-9926509-2-6 When I tell any Truth it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it but for the sake of defending those who Do. William Blake In this […]]]>

When I tell any Truth it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it but for the sake of defending those who Do.
William Blake

In this loud volume swansong the Association of Musical Marxists puts its no-money where its mouth is, not for the first time. As a physical thing, the anthology is luxurious and awkward: a seductive riot (uprising, downrising, community fireworks display etc.) of Day-glo, a distracting wealth of graphic charms in an outsize paperback whose shape and weight resist distracted or any other sort of effortless reading. The hardest thing about reviewing the book was opening it on a small desk next to a desktop computer. Read it on the bus and your neighbour has to try hard not to read it too (which may well be part of the point). This is mentioned only because it has something to do with the reason a review, as opposed to an annotated track-listing, can be written at all: the anomaly whereby the mutual non-resemblance of 200+ textual and visual components is so untainted by diversity – let alone editorial broad (as in ‘Church’)-mindedness – that something can be said about the whole.2
As will surprise no-one who ever saw things two or more of the contributors made before, the agent binding their un-like materials together is the same one implied in the name of AMM publisher Unkant. Namely, practical disdain for the Mind-Thing dualism figureheaded for 200+ years by Kant of Koenigsberg3.

Yes, we dislike Kant for separating the ‘best’ in us from animals… […] …on the one side, those who want to turn Marxism into a new school of refined and educated opinion, reified ex pertise and formalist BS; and, on the other side, us.4By elevating imagination to a separate sphere, cultural idealism actually quarantines it, and prevents it having a productive relationship to scientific and practical endeavour.5

These axioms are not so much reiterated as played out, tested, over nearly 500 pages of entangled prose polemic, verse polemic, flyposters, flyers, musical scores, historical research, postcards, comics, exegesis, memoir, t-shirt design, book cover design, correspondence, conversation, drawing, collage, complete pamphlets, paint spatters and found things. The body of the book is necessarily intrusive because the point is not to state in theory that neither disincarnate thought nor unthinkable flesh is any such thing (which would hardly pass as a fresh piece of Radical Philosophy, although it bears repeating often) but to work out what can be done under those conditions today. Practical strategies against Idealism matter because there’s more at stake than proving philosophical Kantians wrong. As the two excerpts from Robert Dellar’s Splitting in Two make unmistakeable6, an un-Kant standpoint also stands up to scientific superstitions that patrol the real world fully armed. The Idealism confronted here is more than a matter of cloudy, flesh-neglectful contemplation: at least as often it’s actively preoccupied with management of The Body (emphasis on the definite article) in the name of abstract principle, to be applied in turn to social life as unacknowledged whole. Speculative Realism Positivist Mindfulness will probably soon make its excuses and leave, but its neo-Lombrosian premises are going nowhere. Leading spec. realtor Ray Brassier once railed7 against “marxisant” music-talk that invokes “human subjectivity, the interdependency between indi-vidual and social consciousness” and so on: all so much “early bourgeois modernity”, or indeed “Idealism”. Yet the proposed neurotechnological corrective (“brain fingerprinting, neural lie-detectors” etc., to be “confronted” – if some obsolete subject insists – “only…with neurobiological resources”) reinstates a hardy Neoplatonist theme. Petty social subject- objects are made of the canonical clay, serving as a seam of bio-behavioural data for a spectral Intellect to suck up, digest and reform. Prophecies of this sort tend to ignore the backside of the cycle, in which the findings excreted by the Spheres are composted through layers of professional guidance down to the level of policy, at which point they become the merely historical factors excluded as spam (canned meat sense) from the next intake of life-metrics.
So advanced Idealism depends on The Body as much as it institutionalizes Mind, even if it would prefer not to watch the ordeals undergone every day by bodies. Meanwhile, AMM polemicists may rarely care to mention, say, neuroeconomics by name, but their counter-Kantianism already has its measure. They answer with a libidinous aesthetics, a calculated slap/stick impact which is also history written while below. So much is staked on talk about music because so much is at stake at those thresholds where some body’s audible flailing works directly on another nervous system, decoupling the spiritual silo from its organism, the labour unit from its rational choice. And the stakes can’t be raised without reference to the monstrosities ranged against all such provisional joy. Eg.:

the institutionally empowered knock at the door that even – no, especially when it hasn’t happened yet – turns life into day release or worse for the half of any given city forced to live not quite inside the law. This product of capital’s fondness for demanding the impossible of its subject-objects is best described by Assassin contributor Sean Bonney elsewhere (http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/, passim) but the same siege-realism seeps through the excerpt from his Happiness here, along with those from Dellar, Michael Tencer, Stefan Jaworzyn, and a roster of contributors unable to afford the luxury of resignation8.

A knock at the door, also known as:

[…] him who is disgust him being he who sicks between your stomach lining & skin & covers his lips in sick, & makes a sick slick under your skin whenever you swallow anything 9

or:

[…] one in every seven houses in America is empty … one in every 402 Americans is homeless. […] 7,225,800 adults … under ‘correctional supervision’ … around one in every 31 adults. 10

In other words:

Tears—-not sloppy drips, but rather tears as in cuts, or rents.11

Yet no part of the book is simply a list of Terrible Facts12. So much restlessness runs through it that every mention of monstrosity contains the germ of a rejoinder, more often obvious as manner than as optimistic counter-syllogism. Or rather, there are plenty of syllogisms but most elude the opti-pessimism spectrum altogether. The real affront to luxury defeatism lies in the way the arguments are played out by the rest of the page, which repeatedly beats sheet music13 as two-dimensional specimen of musical time, or of the agitation (all senses) displayed by the agent-patients involved. Sean Bonney’s statement that “‘I is another’ = derangement of the social senses” is true even when lifted from its page and left standing alone, but that truth bursts out on all sides in the ‘Letter’ containing the statement, where supposedly personal stories bristle with anti-solipsistic stricture. Unsurprisingly, what’s true there is even more pervasive in the Letter’s original setting, but surprisingly or not it’s hardly less so when re-read in the anthology, where The Psychedelic Bolsheviks, Daphne Lawless, Verity Spott and others demonstrate the im-propriety of the disowned ‘I’ by fleshing the same insight out in wholly un-like ways. 14
Meanwhile the parts that look like historical essays (because in the best sense they are) do nothing to restore the power-sharing pact between professionally detached (tanked) Thought and a private, pre-intellectual ‘I’. Even the most ‘analytical’ contributors keep a near-obscene amount of skin in the game. Their erudition is partisan, or intellectually coherent for the very reasons it would fail Peer Review. Theses on Helen MacFarlane, ‘The Nature of Conflict’, improvisation, money and Marx share with the graphopoetic mayhem on the facing pages a self-endangering impulse and the insight that personal ‘passion’ (that winning CV item) is not in itself the point.
In equal contrast to the whims of introspection and the interchangeable bullet-points of social science – but in keeping with the method of well15 improvised music – each conjunction of sentence and image, verse or sentence in The Assassin is a matter of necessity: either an utterance must follow the one before it and precede the next one or it’s better left unuttered. Lawless, who invented ‘Chaos Marxism’ from Auckland, New Zealand (Akaranga, Te Ika-a-Maui, since you ask) and whose presence is an extra-high point in a generally vertiginous book, explains why necessity – all senses, indigence included – scrambles the polarities of Mind-Thing, poesis-analysis, profession-dilettantism, etc. Quoting a character in Alan Moore’s Watchmen comic, she writes: We do these things because we are compelled.16

[1.] Actual poster slogan displayed outside a high-end ‘health food’ store in Hackney (London), 2014. Note the prudent use of “like” in place of “as”: management apparently feared the low margins on a fully Idealist diet of Ethics and air.

[2.] Conversely, no single text, pagework or advertisement in the book could be ‘done justice to’ in less than 1,500 words of mixed disputation and applause, and almost any one of them would be ill-served by less atttention than any other. Hence the attempt here to discuss only what’s more or less true of the lot.

[3.] The authors seem neither oblivious to nor swayed by arguments deploring Idealism but disculpating Kant. For debate on this point, see the correspondence between Jacob Bard-Rosenberg and Ben Watson at: http://ammarxists.org/why-unkant-reply-to-jacob-bard-rosenberg/.

[8.] Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud, Unkant, London, 2012, from which comes Letter on Poetics, in The Assassin, pp. 321-2; Michael Tencer, Letter From America, pp. 29-32; Public Squirm Rummage Burst Scruple Pap Lingo, p.89; Cartoon Trumpets and Horseshit-Marx Estranged (conversation with T.H.F. Drenching), pp. 117-136; Hostile Takeover, p. 191; Stefan Jaworzyn, I Was A Teenage Coathanger Abortion, pp. 81-87. These references are singled out arbitrarily for reasons of space; the same (i.e. experience of social siege and consequent inability to afford, in any sense, resignation) is also true of every contributor of whom the reviewer knows anything at all.

[12.] Which is not to say that lists of Terrible Facts cannot be salutary can be when used properly. See: http://www.militant-esthetix.co.uk/stickers/stickersfr.htm

[13.] The ‘scores’ reprinted in the book – by Marie-Angelique Bueler (Sonic Pleasure), Richard Hemmings (Evil Dick), Simon H. Fell, Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu (pp. 221-229) are Exceptional Facts but not exceptions to the rule implied here: unlike ‘sheet music’ in the sense held over from the centuries before sound recording, they are working components of the reproduction of singular sounds, not purported equivalents of the sounds as such. See also: Guillaume Ollendorff, The Society of the Spectrum, pp. 387-9, and Andy Wilson, Ben Watson, The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu, pp. 391-405, from Andy Wilson (ed.), Cosmic Orgasm: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu, Unkant, London, 2013.

[14.] Bonney, Letter on Poetics, originally published in Happiness…, republished in The Assassin. See note [8.]. As in note [8.] above and note [15.] below, the names actually mentioned are metonymic: in order eventually to finish the sentence, a few parts must stand for something true of the whole. In this case: Psychedelic Bolsheviks, Manifesto Edit By Mushroom Watcher; Take Your Balls Away; Permanent Avant Garde; Normally Our Politics; Minimum Wage; Korsch 8-Pack, pp. 193-200; Daphne Lawless, Newhaven Journeyman 1&2, pp. 159-161; Verity Spott, Coupling Anterior, see note [9.] above.

[15.] ‘Well’ has nothing to do with virtuosity or purity. OBNOX improvised André Williams into a sad London café earlier this year. Certain skilful pedagogical players improvise TED talks.

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/eat-like-an-idealist-the-assassin-association-of-musical-marxists-reader-book-review/feed/0Jeffrey Herf: Undeclared Wars with Israel East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967-1989 (Book Review)http://datacide-magazine.com/jeffrey-herf-undeclared-wars-with-israel-east-germany-and-the-west-german-far-left-1967-1989-book-review/
http://datacide-magazine.com/jeffrey-herf-undeclared-wars-with-israel-east-germany-and-the-west-german-far-left-1967-1989-book-review/#respondTue, 20 Jun 2017 08:46:24 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4685Jeffrey Herf: Undeclared Wars with Israel East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967-1989 Cambridge University Press, New York 2016 ISBN 978-1-107-46162-8 Jeffrey Herf is a history professor at the University of Maryland and has published extensively on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and political Islam. Undeclared Wars with Israel 1967-1989 is his latest book. […]]]>

Jeffrey Herf: Undeclared Wars with Israel
East Germany and the
West German Far Left 1967-1989
Cambridge University Press, New York 2016
ISBN 978-1-107-46162-8

Jeffrey Herf is a history professor at the University of Maryland and has published extensively on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and political Islam. Undeclared Wars with Israel 1967-1989 is his latest book. At the core of this book is the ideological, economic and military support for Arab dictatorships and the Palestinian nationalist movement by the government of the German Democratic Republic in the period between the 1967 Six-Day War and the end of the East German state in 1989/1990. Herf uses extensive research of the Stasi (GDR secret service) archives, the official party press, documents from the United Nations, including the extensive reports by Israeli ambassadors regarding the territorial intrusions and massacres perpetrated by the PLO and its associated member groups in those years.

This (partially new) research is embedded in a history of the relationship of the Soviet Bloc with the state of Israel and the development of the struggle of Arab/Palestinian nationalists against Israel, whether through open warfare, shelling of Israeli cities across the border with rockets, guerrilla actions inside Israel – often consisting in massacres of civilians – or hijackings and murder in the international arena, or through diplomatic means on a bilateral level and often at the UN.

Herf is broadening this research to cover the role of the West German far left in the context of these conflicts. The post-1967 radical left is portrayed here as radically anti-Zionist, if not anti-Semitic. Prominent examples after that time are people and organisations like Dieter Kunzelmann and the Tupamaros Westberlin, Ulrike Meinhof and the RAF, the Revolutionary Cells and their partaking in the hijacking of an Israeli plane to Entebbe, as well as examples from the so-called K-Groups. In my opinion, Herf, while accurately displaying dubious points in the history of the radical left in West Germany, fails to describe the often contradictory developments of some of these groups. For this reason I divide this review in two parts. The first is the book review proper, while the second extends the discussion of the relationship of some of the groups on the West German radical left with both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in a way that goes far beyond the confines of a book review and hopefully offers additional insights.

I

In 1947, the United Nations proposed a partition plan for the British mandate Palestine towards a two-state solution for an Arab and a Jewish state next to each other. The two-state solution was rejected by the Palestinian nationalists as well as by the Arab countries, and the state of Israel was declared unilaterally. The next day, the combined armies of the neighbouring countries attacked Israel with the intention of destroying the state and ‘driving the Jews into the sea’.

The founding of Israel was initially supported and diplomatically recognised by the Soviet Union. A speech by foreign minister Gromyko had previously affirmed the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland on the territory of the former British mandate. It was the weapons acquired from Czechoslovakia that proved instrumental for Israel to win the war.

Soon after, however, the Soviet Bloc made a u-turn and began to regard Israel as a part of the ‘imperialist bloc’. This change went along with an anti-Semitic turn in domestic affairs. This can be exemplified in the wave of show trials in the last years of Stalin’s rule, most notably the ‘doctor’s plot’ in the Soviet Union, a completely invented conspiracy claiming that a group of (mostly Jewish) doctors were plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders. Another example is the ‘Slansky trial’ in Prague, where 14 members of the leadership of the Communist Party, 11 of them Jewish, were accused of being involved in a ‘Trotskyist-Titoist-Zionist’ conspiracy. Eleven of the 14 were executed. These are just two out of many events that show the emergence of a new anti-Semitic paranoia which was given an anti-Zionist ‘gloss’ in the Eastern Bloc.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the overt anti-Semitism merged into an anti-Zionist consensus which remained in place until the breakdown of the Eastern Bloc, and now enjoys an after-life in some sections of the international left. This phenomenon became particularly virulent with the events around and after the Six-Day War of 1967. After that event, the Eastern Bloc intensified its diplomatic relations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as well as the regimes of Syria, Iraq and other countries.

These alliances have to be seen in the context of the Cold War constellation and the striving of the GDR, in particular, for international diplomatic recognition. Indeed, by positioning themselves on the side of the PLO, the GDR gained diplomatic recognition from a number of countries. This helped to break the isolation caused by West Germany’s ‘Hallstein Doctrine’, a policy designed to keep the Federal Republic of Germany from entertaining diplomatic relations with any country that recognised the GDR, which prevented many countries from doing so.

But the GDR’s alliances went deeper than mere tactical lip service. They provided not only propagandistic, but also logistical support, including weapons sales and deliveries. These, as Herf documents, reached substantial proportions, calling into question the often repeated argument by certain apologists for the GDR that at least the GDR prevented further wars from being waged from German soil. Not only were hundreds of thousands of Kalashnikow rifles and other weaponry exported, including rocket launchers and Mig fighter planes, these planes were also serviced by East German technical personnel. About 3,000 foreign military were trained in East Germany, including members of the PLO. There were also direct contacts to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the so-called left groups within the PLO.

Recipients of this support were countries like Egypt and Syria, both countries who harboured many former Nazis, many of whom were in positions as advisors to military and government. Also supported was the Palestinian nationalist movement, whose historic leader, Hadj Amin al-Husseini, had been a German ally in the second world war. Nevertheless, in 1967, the Soviet ambassador to the UN, Nikolai Fedorenko, ‘compared Israel to Nazi Germany and called for Israel’s leaders to be put on trial as the Nazi leaders had been in Nuremberg’ (p.44), a line that was soon enough parroted by Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader.

Although it is particularly insidious – and a feat of political pseudo-psychology to boot – to equate Zionism with fascism, one has to keep in mind that, ever since they became a political power in the 1920s, Stalinists have regularly resorted to slandering others as ‘fascists’. Social democracy was slandered as ‘social fascism’ in the period of the late ‘20s to the early ‘30s, then Trotsky was slandered as a fascist agent, later students were shouting ‘USA-SA-SS!’ while carrying pictures of Ho Chi Minh at demonstrations against the Vietnam war. Only a little bit later, some Maoists charged the Soviet Union with being fascistic, or social-fascist.

The closest Stalinism came to a ‘fascism theory’ was Georgi Dimitrov’s idea that fascism was just a particularly brutal form of capitalist domination to which the bourgeoisie, in times of crisis, would resort. Fascism was thus seen merely as a tool to smash the working class organisations, and since the Stalinists saw themselves as the very embodiment of the working class organisation, in the form of the “Communist Party”, they could level the charge of fascism at anyone who was seen to be on the ‘other side’.

Unfortunately, this bad habit was also picked up by some leftists in the West. When ‘applied’ to Israel, it took on quite peculiar forms, such as Dieter Kunzelmann demanding the left should get rid of its ‘Jew-complex’, and Ulrike Meinhof’s opinion that the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic games in Munich was an anti-fascist action showing that the developed imperialism was a ‘through and through fascist system’ (i.e. even more fascist than ‘NS-fascism’) (see more below).

Certainly one factor that caused some of the New Left to turn against Israel in the summer and autumn of 1967 was the German press coverage, which described the Israeli military campaign in glowingly positive terms as a Blitzkrieg and Moshe Dayan as a latter-day ‘desert fox’. Nevertheless this doesn’t explain the historically wrong and absurd justifications prevalent in the left. It seems rather the case that Kunzelmann’s anti-Semitism, for example, was ‘unlocked’, and his organisation tried to bomb a Jewish community centre in West Berlin on the very anniversary of the day the Nazis unleashed their violent public attacks on Jews in 1938, the ‘Kristallnacht’.

Neues Deutschland in the meantime inevitably reported the wars and conflicts in the Middle East as a conflict of an imperialist Israel as the only aggressor, all the while keeping quiet about the aggressive activities of the other side. If the official language of the GDR media and politicians glossed over the terrorist activities of the GDR’s Palestinian allies, then this may have been tactical. Herf writes: ‘When speaking frankly to one another, however, Stasi officials used refreshing candor, acknowledging the nature of terrorism and their willingness to support it’.

In other publications in the GDR, the issue was handled slightly differently. For example, in Terror – Hintergründe, Täter, Opfer by Martin Robbe (Dietz 1987, the title means Terror – Backgrounds, Perpetrators, Victims) the PFLP is clearly described as a terrorist organisation, although some excuses are made. The main thrust of the booklet is still the dominant anti-Zionism. Crucially, George Habash, the leader of the PFLP, is quoted as saying (p.31): ‘The attacks of the People’s Front are based on quality, not quantity. We believe to kill a Jew away from the battlefield is more efficient than to kill 100 of them in battle; it draws more attention. And if we set fire to a department store in London, these few flames are worth more than if we burn down two Kibbuzim’. The remarkable thing is that Habash is clearly speaking about Jews (and not ‘Zionists’) and declares them to be worldwide targets. He makes no effort to conceal the clearly anti-Semitic nature of the campaigns of the PFLP, nor does the GDR-journalist Robbe see a need to camouflage it.

Nevertheless, the GDR needed to balance its support for the ‘anti-Imperialist struggle’ with retaining a certain respectability, meaning to avoid being seen as state sponsors of terrorism. Herf calls this a ‘eurocentric’ approach, which meant at once supporting the activities in the Middle East, but also not allowing its territory to be a springboard for terrorist activities in Western Europe.

II

Herf is using some examples of the radical left and its support for Palestinian terrorism. Here he is very selective with the information he provides and leaves out substantial context. I will illustrate this with three examples.

1. Ulrike Meinhof

In the July 1967 issue of the monthly left-wing news magazine Konkret, Ulrike Meinhof’s editorial was titled ‘Three Friends of Israel’ (Drei Freunde Israels). Only weeks after the Six-Day War, she expressed the solidarity of the left with Israel, a solidarity she described as unconditional, but something she managed to express in a critical way, pointing out ‘justified demands’ of the Arab side. She juxtaposes this solidarity with the other two friends of Israel (besides the left): US imperialism and the German right-wing press. Both of these are shown to simply instrumentalise a supposed friendship with Israel for their own particular purposes. Both are shown to be hypocritical compared to a left solidarity based on anti-fascism.

As far as I know, Meinhof did not return to this topic in her time as Konkret’s star columnist. Increasingly, Konkret’s coverage reflected the ‘anti-Zionist turn’ of the rest of the left in those years. Meinhof in the meantime was drifting away, but for different reasons. She and her husband, Konkret publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl, developed all kinds of differences, personal, political and concerning the direction of the magazine.

Meinhof radicalised her position to the point of picking up arms against the state and became one of the founders of the Red Army Faction. This is not the place to reiterate the history of this most important of the German urban guerilla groups, but to mention the text she wrote following the kidnapping and subsequent killing of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich Olympic games in 1972. In her text The Action of Black September in Munich, on the Strategy of Anti-Imperialist Struggle (Die Aktion des Schwarzen September in München: Zur Strategie des antiimperialistischen Kampfes) she celebrates the massacre as ‘simultaneously anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and internationalist’. Herf calls this text ‘one of the most important documents in the history of anti-Semitism in Europe after the Holocaust’. In any case, there is nothing ‘anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and internationalist’ about kidnapping and murdering Israeli athletes. The whole text is a mind-boggling read, much less stringent and articulate than Das Konzept Stadtguerilla, the first programmatic text of the RAF from April 1971, and an eternity away from the nuanced Konkret column from just five years earlier. Herf however presents Meinhof’s position as static, rather than the end point of a shocking development.

He does the same when he describes the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the paper Arbeiterkampf where the development went in the opposite direction:

2. Arbeiterkampf

Under the sub-chapter title ‘The West German Radical Left Responds to the PLO’s Terrorism’ (p. 282), Herf focuses on two communist organisations in Germany: the Kommunistische Bund Westdeutschland (KBW) and the Kommunistische Bund (KB) and its paper, Arbeiterkampf. Both organisations are commonly seen as so-called K-Groups, Marxist-Leninist groups which formed in the period of decline of the radical student movement after 1968 following an ‘anti-revisionist’ line, meaning they opposed the Soviet Union and supported Maoist China. While the KBW stayed firmly Maoist until its end in the early to mid-80s, the KB was a more independently-minded organisation and moved from a broadly Maoist outset to a more undogmatic position.1

The problem here is that the author doesn’t take into account the development of the KB organisation. Even in the context of the Munich massacre of 1972 there were differing opinions expressed in Arbeiterkampf, one of which Herf quotes, creating the impression that this was the organisation’s sole opinion. Granted, even the differing opinions were at this point firmly rooted in an anti-Zionist consensus and only differed minimally.

If we look at Arbeiterkampf’s coverage of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, it is striking how Israel is constantly portrayed as the only aggressor. The coverage is one-sided, often manipulative and frankly dishonest. Much is made of the Israel-friendly press coverage by the Springer-papers, as if that proved already that surely Israel was wrong, evil, and its enemies should be supported. Meinhof’s crucial insight into this matter from 1967 had been well and truly forgotten in the radical left by 1973, sacrificed for an uncritical anti-imperialism. This was certainly the case with most of the K-Groups.

However, an article in issue 37 (December 1973) of Arbeiterkampf titled ‘The Arab Bourgeoisie – With the People Against the People’ – mainly focusing on Egypt – is interesting in that it shows this anti-imperialism not being devoid of criticism: It describes a society between the demagoguery of ‘Arab Socialism’ of the ruling party and the ‘islamic-fascist’ Muslim Brotherhood. It also denounces not only the opportunistic foreign policies of the Egyptian government, but also its ‘fascist domestic policies’, even pointing out that under the post-1967 war economy the people were burdened with economic hardship while the war against Israel was used to deflect the class struggle.

Over the years, other cracks in the consensus started showing in Arbeiterkampf, albeit slowly. In July 1981, (ak 205) an article was published under the title ‘Hoffmann bei “den Palästinenstern”? – Anmerkungen zu Neonazis und ihren arabischen Freunden’ – “Hoffmann with the ‘Palestinians?’ Notes on Neo-Nazis and their Arab Friends”. Here the authors react to reports in the press that the Neo-Nazi paramilitaries of the ‘Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann’ (“Hoffmann paramilitary group”) had contacts to the PLO/Al Fatah that included arms deals and training in Palestinian camps. Although the authors partially try to dismiss these reports, they made their own investigation of the ‘brown trail of relations between (west) German fascists and arab right wing extremists’, which was ‘clearly possible to follow and is beyond doubt’.

The article traces the exodus of Nazis from Germany to Egypt in 1945 and the opportunities they had there to continue their anti-Semitic agitation. ‘The central figure was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and symbolic leader of “all Palestinians”, Hadji Amin al Hussein [sic], then based in Cairo. Before 1945, he was active as a Nazi-propagandist, first in Berlin, then in France’. The Nazis in Egypt had a field day after the coup d’etat of Gamal Abdel Nasser: ‘Under Nasser former Nazi-Wehrmacht officers, SS men and Gestapo-cadres were moving in droves into the teams of experts of the Egyptian police, army and propaganda apparatus’. The article also mentions the promotion of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as well as the denial of the holocaust in this remarkable quote from Egyptian foreign minister Hussein-Zulfiqar Sabry (1915-94) from a speech in the Egyptian parliament: ‘The Nazis never exterminated 6 million Jews, not even one million. Hitler allowed Jews to emigrate if they paid a certain sum. As far as the poorer Jews were concerned, he sent them into camps, so he could negotiate with the Zionist leaders in order to get the finance and materials he needed for the continuation of the war’ (Le Monde 5-5-1962, quoted in AK).

The ‘first activists’ of the post war Nazi scene ‘knew therefore exactly who they had to approach for their efforts at “German-Arab friendship”‘ and when former Goebbels co-worker Egon-Arthur Schmidt organised a first meeting to found a ‘German-Arab League’, representatives of the Arab League as well as the consulates of Egypt and Syria were present. Several such attempts at forming collaborative organisations followed by different sections of the German far right, both from ex-Nazis as well as from the Otto Strasser movement. Their ‘Deutsch-Arabische Gesellschaft’ (“German-Arab Society”) was, according to AK, ‘excelling at anti-Israel propaganda as well as propaganda directed against the Wiedergutmachungsleistungen (restitutions) towards Israel’. Erwin Schönborn, an organiser, publisher and holocaust-denier with a decades long history was the connection from the post war days to the later neo-Nazi movement.

In the final paragraphs, the Arbeiterkampf authors point out that the ‘assassins (Attentäter) of Black September (at the Munich olympics 1972)’ chose ‘a lawyer explicitly from the far right scene, RA (attorney) Schöttler, from Recklinghausen, (…) who otherwise is mainly known for his legal actions on behalf of Croatian terrorists associated with the Ustasha’. The article then points out that prominent Nazi terrorists found refuge in the middle east and Iran, among them Manfred Roeder and the aforementioned Hoffmann. The article ends: ‘Instead of conducting the unthankful business of fabricating out of this a renewed “proof” of the connection between “right and left terror”, it would be necessary to completely uncover this thread of international brown contacts. At least the federal German VS [Verfassungsschutz – internal secret sevice] doesn’t seem to be in a mood for this’.

Well, the German left wasn’t very much in the mood for it either. Arbeiterkampf also joined the anti-Zionist chorus again when, a year later, the 1982 Lebanon war broke out and the paper titled: ‘Final Solution of the Palestinian Question’. But by then this wasn’t the consensus anymore, it was rejected by central committee member Eva Groepler and others. Groepler published a series of articles in AK dealing with the history of anti-Semitism, but ended up leaving the KB in 1986. From 1989 onwards, though, there were some radical changes and a faction of the KB started developing a more systematic and explicit critique of anti-Zionism. When the KB finally split and dissolved itself in 1991, one faction (initially calling itself Gruppe K, and publishing the journal Bahamas, which still appears today) moved towards a position of unconditional solidarity with Israel. And even the other half, which went on to publish Arbeiterkampf after re-naming it analyse & kritik (which also still appears today) abandoned the uncritical anti-Zionism of yesteryear.

3. Revolutionary Cells: From Entebbe to ‘Gerd Albartus is Dead’

The most infamous case of German left anti-Semitism of the 1970s is probably the involvement of two members of the Revolutionary Cells in the hijacking of an Air France plane on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris. The hijacking was done by a spin-off of the PFLP, the PFLP-External Operations under orders from Wadie Haddad. The plane eventually landed in Entebbe, Uganda, where the hijackers enjoyed the protection of dictator Idi Amin, a vicious anti-Semite and admirer of Hitler.

As the story goes, the passengers were divided into two groups, Jewish and non-Jewish. The non-Jewish half was freed, the other kept as hostages. If this is true, then this was the first time since the holocaust that Germans were involved in selecting Jews for possible murder. Testimony from Jewish survivors is that they felt a mass execution was imminent.2

This did not happen. Instead, an Israeli commando flew to Uganda and managed to free most of the hostages. Three hostages, the Israeli commander – Jonathan Netanyahu (brother of the current prime minister), all the hijackers, and several dozen Ugandan soldiers were killed.

Indeed this instance has, according to their own testimony, lead several figures from the far left to distance themselves from previous activities and from former comrades.
As far as the revolutionary left was concerned, Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann, the members of the Revolutionary Cells who took part in the hijacking, were initially seen as victims of imperialism.

This only changed when in 1991 a Revolutionary Cell3
published a text titled ‘Gerd Albartus is Dead’, which detailed that Albartus (one of their members) had been executed in Syria by one of the Palestinian groups after a mock trial. It was suspected that the real reason was Albartus’ homosexuality.

This shock prompted the group to take stock of their previously uncritical support for Palestinian nationalism (and Third-Worldism in general), as well as look at the anti-Semitism embedded in the movement, including in the events at Entebbe. This in turn caused an extended controversy in the German radical left.4

This development is also left out by Herf, which makes it possible that the book can be used as a weapon against the left of any type. This can be shown to be the case with the positive review in the Weekly Standard, the flagship magazine of the US Neo-cons.5

To sum things up: With Undeclared Wars with Israel, Herf presents a very interesting book with substantial work on the support of the Eastern Bloc, and in particular the GDR, for the war against Israel. He’s backing this up with original and thorough research. His section about the West German radical left is not incorrect but it’s incomplete, and as such potentially misleading. The differences between different sections of the German far left and their often contradictory developments should not be underestimated, nor instrumentalised.

What needs to be examined in more detail is the almost desperate desire of some of the radical left to find another canvas to project their anti-imperialist fantasies on, after the Viet Cong slowly went out of fashion.

There was a strange overlapping of open anti-Semitism and the continuation of the Nazi project to eradicate Jews with Cold War power relations. Zionists of all denominations were vilified by the Western left despite the fact that some of the Palestinian organisations supported by the Eastern bloc were also funded by the international far right. This included the supposedly left PFLP which received money from François Genoud, the Swiss Nazi banker.6

A reasonable and principled response by pro-revolutionaries should be to scrutinize the history of the left and draw conclusions from it, namely in order to avoid making the same mistakes and in order to purge the poisonous and counter-revolutionary legacy of Stalinism from its ranks.
Or to quote the title of the booklet documenting the discussions and controversies concerning ‘Gerd Albartus is Dead’ from 1992: Critique only makes us stronger.

End Notes

1‘Kommunistischer Bund’ should be translated as ‘Communist League’. Herf instead gives it two names and two different sets of numbers of members and circulation of the paper within the space of two pages (p.283-284). Once he calls it ‘Communist Organization’ and once ‘Communist Association’. Membership is given as 1,700 strong once and as 800-1,500 a page later, circulation of Arbeiterkampf as 24,000 and 17,000 respectively. This is an example of shoddy copy editing on the side of author and publishing house (and not the only one).

2A recent book titled Legenden um Entebbe, edited by Markus Mohr (Unrast Verlag, Münster, 2016) tries to show that the ‘selection narrative’ is ‘nonsense’. While Mohr and his co-authors amassed an impressive amount of material and provide an interesting read, they fail in the stated aim. Even if there were no strict separation between Jewish and non-Jewish passengers (but ‘only’ one based on whether they held Israeli passports), there was clearly a specific selection. The use of the term is justified, even if a handful of Jewish passengers were freed, for whatever reasons. After all, the selections in the extermination camp were not separating Jews from non-Jews, but those Jews who were about to be murdered immediately from those that were still of some ‘use’ in the work camp.
While it is worthwhile to scrutinise these ‘narratives’, one should remember that history does not merely consist of narratives.

5http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-german-lefts-undeclared-war-on-israel/article/2004956
The Weekly Standard is unable/unwilling to make a distinction between different strains of leftism. For them, everything that starts with a C is the same. Obviously this is not just unscientific, but straight up stupid. Unfortunately, Herf doesn’t safeguard his research against such instrumentalisation. Or is this Herf’s intention? This would be somehow strange since he shared a stage among others with Stephan Grigat, Gerhard Scheit, Matthias Küntzel, Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, who are Marxist publicists as recently as January 2017.

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/jeffrey-herf-undeclared-wars-with-israel-east-germany-and-the-west-german-far-left-1967-1989-book-review/feed/0Far-Left Press Coverage of the 2016 Anti-Semitism Row in the Labour Party and other Leftist Groupshttp://datacide-magazine.com/far-left-press-coverage-of-the-2016-anti-semitism-row-in-the-labour-party-and-other-leftist-groups/
http://datacide-magazine.com/far-left-press-coverage-of-the-2016-anti-semitism-row-in-the-labour-party-and-other-leftist-groups/#respondMon, 19 Jun 2017 22:39:05 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4672“When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.” April 28, 2016 at 8:50 in the morning, Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London and prominent figure in the Labour Party for […]]]>

“When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”

April 28, 2016 at 8:50 in the morning, Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London and prominent figure in the Labour Party for several decades made the baffling statement quoted above on Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) radio. Supposedly he was defending MP Naz Shah1. She had reposted a meme on facebook in 2014, suggesting Israeli Jews should relocate from Israel to the US. This was made public in April 2016 and led to the suspension of Shah from the Labour party, because the posting was seen as anti-Semitic. Livingstone, asked to comment on it, said ‘her remarks were over the top. But she’s not antisemitic. And I’ve been in the party for 47 years. I’ve never heard anyone say anything antisemitic’.

While Shah made a concerted effort to minimise the damage to herself and the party and swiftly issued a number of apparently genuine apologies (and eventually got reinstated), Livingstone’s radio comments made the whole thing turn into a proper scandal and a gift to the right wing press and the Tory party, since the local elections were only a week away.

Livingstone was swiftly suspended from Labour and sacked by LBC, where he had hosted a show with former Tory minister David Mellor for 8 years. He remained unapologetic, quoting the book by Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, which tries to posit a collaboration and similarity of intention between Zionists and Nazis. This is not supported by serious historians. Hitler himself left absolutely no doubt that he detested Zionism. In Mein Kampf he dismissed the conflicts between liberal Jews and Zionists as mock fights, in his opinion the ‘inner togetherness’ of all Jews was beyond doubt.
Hitler’s professed anti-Semitism explicitly included anti-Zionism.2

What did Livingstone want to achieve with his idiotic statements? The Weekly Worker wrote in 2004 ‘Livingstone is an accomplished political operator, with a near genius for manipulation and backroom freewheeling’ whose ‘further ambitions (…) no doubt stretch to No10 Downing Street’, adding ‘Livingstone himself cheerfully admits: “I love meetings and plotting. I didn’t get where I am today without plotting”‘.3

What was he plotting this time? Was he trying to plunge Labour into a crisis a week before the elections? Perhaps he’s not so close to Corbyn after all? Or is he just a loose cannon — or more than that — a liability?

And what did the far left say about these incidents? Let’s look at a few examples.

On May 6, 2016, an article in The New Worker was titled: So Much for Free Speech. The article, by Daphne Liddle, a leading member of the New Communist Party (NCP), began like this: ‘THE GOVERNMENT and the media are hounding various old and new members of Labour with spurious accusations of ant-Semitism [sic] for remarks that, when seen in full context, are nothing of the kind, in order to undermine support for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour in the run-up to the local elections’.

Rather than elaborating on the charges – and perhaps trying to refute them – the article goes on to describe how the government ‘is planning new “anti-terrorist” measures that add up to a major crackdown on free speech and can truly be described as creeping fascism’. The connection? ‘(…) when the Government starts to redefine the meaning of “hate speech” we begin to understand where it is all leading and how it ties in with the current ruling class-backed campaign to paint Labour supporters and campaigners for rights for Palestinians as anti-Semites’.

Somehow Liddle then manages to jump to the claim that while the government ‘is channelling tax-payers’ money into the Ukraine (…) to support an illegal government in Kiev that includes self-confessed Nazi-supporters (…) [it] has the gall to accuse life-long anti-fascist activists like Ken Livingstone and Gerry Downing of being anti-Semites (…)’.

The last quarter of the front page article is then taken up by quotes from a statement of the Jewish Socialist Group (JSG) expressing their view that they see ‘the current fearmongering about anti-Semitism in the Labour party for what it is – a conscious and concerted effort by right-wing political forces to undermine the growing support among Jews and non-Jews alike for the Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and a measure of the desperation of his opponents. We stand against anti-Semitism, against racism and fascism and in support of refugees. We stand for free speech and open debate on Israel, Palestine and Zionism’. This is illustrated with the only photograph on the front page: David Rosenberg of the JSG holding the group’s banner at the May Day march a few days earlier.

But The New Worker is not engaging in open debate; in the editorial on page two, after dutifully distancing itself from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion-type anti-Semitism, it cunningly wheels out Bishop Desmond Tutu, who has a habit of comparing Israel with apartheid-era South Africa.
Instead of open debate, the NCP supports the ‘Boycott, Disinvest [sic!] and Sanction (BDS) campaign’ and claims: ‘This is why the agencies of the Israeli state are doing their best to undermine and discredit supporters of BDS and Palestinian rights by tarnishing them as anti-Semites’, and in addition to government, media, the Israeli state, there are also ‘Zionist supporters – not all of whom are Jewish – within the right wing of the Labour Party who have still not reconciled themselves to Corbyn’s leadership and are trying to undermine it by splitting Corbyn from some of his longest and most loyal supporters with the taint of anti-Semitism’.
A dangerous world!

Thankfully the New Worker knows a place in the world where things are a lot better: in the ‘People’s Korea’. The center spread of the same issue is made up of a report of a ‘delegation from the Association for the Study of Songun Politics UK (ASSPUK) and the Juche Idea Study Group of England (JISGE) which is singing the praises of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the ‘dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un’ in the most sycophantic ways. Fancy hotel, full shops (with ‘plenty of cola’!), palatial Metro system, new high rises and boulevards! In fact the visitor was able to see ‘the massive new Sci-Tech complex on Ssuk Islet. It is eco-friendly, using geothermal power and natural light. I saw rows and rows of DPRK-made computers. It will only be a matter of time before the DPRK overtakes the declining and decadent West in terms of technology and science’. Social problems? No: ‘We could see no “human rights” problem, only ordinary Korean people enjoying a good life’. Presumably there is also no problem regarding free speech, because in the DPRK there’s no Tory government, right wing media, right wing Labour or other Zionist supporters who are responsible for the dire situation of free speech in the UK.

Why, one might ask, deal with the opinions of apparent or obvious cranks such as the unreconstructed Stalinists and Kim Jong Un supporters from the NCP? While they may not command much public support or direct influence, it should be mentioned that they are still affiliated with the Labour Representation Committee and as such have a more direct connection to the Corbyn wing of the Labour party beyond just calling for support and votes.

Within the Labour party is the group publishing the paper The Red Flag. This group was formerly know as Workers Power, the British section of the League for the Fifth International. Workers Power originated as a spin-off from the International Socialists (who later became the Socialist Workers Party) when their faction was excluded from the IS in 1974.

In late 2015 the group decided to dissolve itself into the Labour Party, publishing The Red Flag with the intention of turning Labour into a ‘socialist party with a programme for revolutionary change in society’.

This may be less bonkers than looking towards the DPRK for progress and guidance, but only slightly. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Labour Party, which includes the editors of The Red Flag, should know that it never was and never will be a revolutionary party.

And what does The Red Flag have to say about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party? It mirrors the shuffle to reassure everybody, including themselves, that ‘Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism’, instead we are witnessing ‘A cynical campaign (…) in full swing to destabilize the Labour leadership’, consisting of ‘allegations which are as exaggerated as they are self serving’, a ‘campaign by Labour’s right wing which is clever, carefully orchestrated and utterly unprincipled’.

What at least sets The Red Flag apart from most others is that they concede that such a thing as anti-Semitism in Labour (and presumably the wider left) can actually exist, only to stress that it is at the most a tiny marginal phenomenon. But even Ken Livingstone admitted that there may be ‘three or four’ anti-Semites among the hundreds of thousands of party members…

The Red Flag group at least implicitly maintain that if someone says ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jews’ they cannot be anti-Semitic, that a truly left wing person cannot be anti-Semitic, and that a Jewish person cannot be anti-Semitic.

Of course like this no real discussion can be had about the issue. The responses are tailored towards damage control, playing things down, and sometimes blatant denial.

The Red Flag: ‘Socialists and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn must uphold the clearest possible distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The first is a form of racism, the second is a challenge to it.
But it is in the interests of antisemites and Zionists to systematically confuse these two phenomena. Antisemites do this so that they can direct anger at Israel’ policies against Jewish people as a whole, a classic tactic of racists. Zionists do it so that they can construe all criticism of their project and crimes as being antisemitic and therefore impermissible. They both do it to silence challenges to racism’.4

But again, whatever the contortions are, the bottom line is that it is ‘sabotage’, a ‘witch hunt’, an orchestrated provocation by the Israel-loving right wing of the party.

What is interesting though is the following aspect: The Corbyn leadership has fairly quickly responded to the anti-Semitic statements of Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone and others by suspending them at least temporarily from party functions.

Most of the left press has nothing better to do than to deny their statements were anti-Semitic. But that means they imply that Corbyn has done the wrong thing. Why? Is the whole thing seen as a Zionist conspiracy that even Corbyn has to play along, because they are so powerful?

Socialist Worker, the weekly paper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) obviously felt a particular need to cover the issue without addressing it.
In it’s issue 2502 (4-10 May 2016) it titled: Tories’ Racist Shame in big letters to elaborate in the short and poor text that ‘In reality the left has always been at the centre of fighting all forms of racism, including antisemitism. The Tories are the real racists.’ On page two this is followed with an article titled ‘Tories have a long, nasty history of antisemitism’. Fine. That is true and should of course be exposed, but in this instance the agenda of the article is a different one. Each paragraph describes anti-Semitic statements or incidents in and around the Conservative Party, except for one paragraph: ‘Much of the current digging around in the internet history of Labour figures has been done by Paul Staines’s right wing Guido Fawkes blog. He got his step up in politics with the fanatically right wing David Hart.’ A supposed connection of Staines with Tory anti-Semitism is then established by the fact that he apparently ‘went for a consolation drink’ with Tory MP Aidan Burley who in turn had once hired a Nazi uniform for some stupid stag party. It’s certainly telling and disgraceful that it seems fairly popular in conservative right wing circles and even within the royal family to pose in Nazi uniforms at costume parties. But to use the fact that Staines had a drink with Burley as a tool to stain him with an indirect anti-Semitism allegation is pretty poor journalism to say the least.

In the ‘News & Comments’ section of the same issue there are several more articles on the topic which show a baffling degree of ignorance and denial, or – perhaps more likely – an ideologically motivated extreme simplification of the issues.
It is claimed that ‘Zionism is based on the idea that Jewish people cannot live peacefully alongside non-Jews’. This insinuates that Zionist Jews just don’t want to live with ‘non-Jews’ (somehow implying a racist component of Zionism), when it is quite the other way round: Zionism is based on the experience of anti-Semitic persecution. The Zionist argument – whether one agrees with it or not – is that Jews need their own armed state to prevent falling victim to pogroms or a continuation or repeat of the holocaust.

Socialist Worker further claims that Israel was set up ‘in alliance with western imperialism’. Not a word about the fact that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries also supported the foundation of Israel. What happened then, according to the Socialist Worker, is that ‘Israeli settlers forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, forcing them into refugee camps where many remain’. Not a word about the fact that it was the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria with additional troops from Iraq who – instead of accepting the UN partition plan and help set up a Palestinian state – invaded the newly declared state of Israel with the aim to ‘sweep them into the sea’. Not only that – the troops of the Arab Legion under the command of King Abdullah of Jordan were trained and commanded by British officers. It was weapons from socialist Czechoslovakia that ensured the survival of the Jewish state and its inhabitants.

The ensuing refugee crisis indeed led to the scandal that a sizeable number of the originally ca. 700’000 displaced Palestinian Arabs are still in refugee camps. But what is too complex for the likes of Socialist Worker is that one crucial reason for this scandal to persist is the refusal of the surrounding regimes to integrate the Palestinian population. They instead decided to let them languish in camps to use them as pawns in their own imperialist games against Israel. (Imagine, after 1945, Germany had refused to integrate the 12-14 million German refugees from the formerly German territories now situated in Poland and the Russian Federation, and insisted on a ‘right to return’!).

It is also not mentioned that roughly the same number of Jewish refugees made their way to Israel from various Arab countries as well as Iran. Rather than let them languish in camps they were given citizenship and integrated into society.

The article also states that those ‘Palestinians who’ve managed to remain live under occupation or siege in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza’ following an ‘ethnic cleansing after the Second World War’. This completely leaves out the fact that over 20% of the Israeli population are Palestinian Arabs (ca. 1.66 million), who are citizens and have representatives in the Knesset (parliament), serve in the IDF (army) up to the rank of a general and even on the Supreme Court of Israel.

The aim here is not to try and accurately describe, let alone present a plan to solve the complexities surrounding the conflicts in the Middle East. What I am pointing out though is that papers such as Socialist Worker are wilfully misrepresenting what Zionism is, how the state of Israel was set up, the situation of Palestinian Arabs inside Israel, as well as many other aspects with the aim of vilifying, demonizing and delegitimizing Israel.

Sadly similar sentiments or contortions persist in most of the ‘far left’ press in Britain, and one could also analyse the Morning Star, the Weekly Worker, News Line, and other papers and find positions that would only slightly differ. One reason for this is that these papers are in most cases the voice pieces of political organisations who, although in constant competition with one another, share a rather narrow terrain of Marxism-Leninism, some of the Trotskyite variation, others of a Stalinist or post-Stalinist persuasion.

One remarkable exception is the Alliance for Workers Liberty and their paper Solidarity. A third camp5 Trotskyist group, the AWL embraces a two state solution for Israel/Palestine and is prepared to acknowledge what is the obvious: ‘[Anti-Zionism and anti-semitism are] not necessarily the same; but quite often they are. The anti-Zionists who carry placards equating Israel with Nazi Germany are anti-semitic. The anti-Zionists who oppose Israel by picketing “Jewish” shops like Marks and Spencers are anti-semitic. The anti-Zionists who complain about Zionist-led media are anti-semitic. And the anti-Zionists who pick on Israeli Jews –uniquely – as a people without the right to a state are a species of anti-semite’ (Solidarity No.403, 4 May 2016). In the same issue Sean Matgamna writes: ‘With Livingstone, the cesspool of pseudo-left “absolute anti-Zionism” that is anti-semitism, overflowed into mainstream politics. It gave the right and the Tories an easy target and an opportunity to bring the scandal out into the open.
It needs to be out in the open. It needs to be discussed. It needs to be purged politically – and the labour movement needs to purge itself from unteachables like Livingstone’. Later in the same article Matgamna stresses: ‘”Left” anti-semitism is no small thing. The future of the labour movement depends on it being opposed, combated and uprooted’.

Matgamna stresses in the same article that it ‘is important in all this not to lose sight of the Palestinians held in the stifling grasp of Israeli occupation, outmatched militarily and more or less helpless’ and that ‘every socialist and honest democrat’ should support the ‘Palestinian demand for their own state, alongside Israel’.

Despite this – or because of it – the AWL (who share many of the other groups’ illusions about the Labour Party) often gets under attack. Most prominent attackers are a tiny group with the grandiose name Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) whose main activity is publishing the Weekly Worker. They allege that the AWL is ‘social imperialist’. This bizarre slur has its root in Maoist China, who called the Soviet Union ‘social imperialist’, and in Hoxhaist Albania, who first joined the Chinese in their opposition towards the SU, but then even turned the invective against China itself!

Sectarian bickering apart, and to get back to the starting point:

Looking at this kind of ‘far left’ press one has to wonder what they want. On the one hand these groups want to make ‘politics’. Critical thinking, balanced assessments and accurate depiction of history are often suspended in favour of ideologised and simplified fronts as well as unprincipled u-turns and zig zags.

Most of them don’t seem to do Corbyn a favour by denying rather obvious problems and rather justifying certain attacks from the right than fending them off.

The ‘socialism’ that Corbyn & co stand for is simply Keynesianism and as such a strategy to rescue capitalism from its crisis. It is quite far removed from an even reformist ‘Marxist’ perspective – if such a thing is even possible in the current political constellation – let alone from a revolutionary one.

Corbyn wants to win the next general election. He may well have second thoughts about which foe will be of help in this project and which ‘friend’ might prove to be an obstacle.

Notes

1 Shah had won the seat for Bradford West, beating George Galloway in 2015. Galloway of course is an arch-’anti-Zionist’ who had declared Bradford an ‘Israel-free zone’.

5 Third camp Trotskyism saw both world powers and economic systems as its enemies: free market capitalism in the West and state capitalism in the East. In contrast to this, conventional Trotskyism kept up support for the Soviet Union which supposedly was already a ‘workers state’, but had merely ‘degenerated’ into a bureaucratic dictatorship.

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/praxis-oppositaer-present-stalins-death-zgk-berlin-17-06-2017/feed/0Datacide 16 Record Reviews by Controlled Weirdnesshttp://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-controlled-weirdness/
http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-controlled-weirdness/#respondThu, 08 Jun 2017 20:33:36 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4661Murray CY Conformist [L.I.E.S.] Dirty techno how it should be. Slow and shuddering with constantly mutating grooves that sound like they’re emanating from the sewer. This is one of the roughest recent L.I.E.S. releases and comes to the Brooklyn label from Glasgow native Murray. These are the type of tunes I’d love to hear in […]]]>

Murray CY
Conformist
[L.I.E.S.]
Dirty techno how it should be. Slow and shuddering with constantly mutating grooves that sound like they’re emanating from the sewer. This is one of the roughest recent L.I.E.S. releases and comes to the Brooklyn label from Glasgow native Murray. These are the type of tunes I’d love to hear in the main room at Berghain, waves of throb enveloping a cavernous warehouse.

Shark Story of the Century
Various
[Contort Yourself]
Contort Yourself is a record label from Glasgow run by Murray CY that releases a soothing mixture of original 80’s Industrial/EBM with brand new raw and dirty techno. This 5 tracker of various artists mixes nice clanging beats from Enrique and techno thud from Beau Wanzer and Prostitutes. Killer cut on this EP for me though is the Broken English Club remix of a 1988 tune from Spanish industrial outfit Esplendor Geométrico. The original is included and is great, tribal raw drums with screams and chants that still sounds fresh. Broken English adds the bass and morphs it into a stripped back pulsing throb with whispered vocals adding to the menace. Perfect for 3am. The past meets the future, possibly?

Gorgeous shimmering house with Patrick Adams style disco elements. It doesn’t waste any time and slams in straight away, rolling bass and piano moving and modulating throughout the mix. One for the cosmic jazz-funk disco raver hands in the air crew. Killer.

First Class
Rappin it Up
[Private Press 1979]
Super dope disco rap obscurity from Jamaica, Queens, New York that I’ve been hunting down for over 20 years. On the A-side Dancin Willie and Moe Meek freestyle over slap bass, moog and strings whilst a female vocal moans. On the flip we get three tracks, an instrumental that emphasises the rhythmic strangeness and out-there arrangement, plus a couple of off kilter funk disco tracks that are reminiscent of some of the ace tunes found on the rarer Peter Brown labels.

DJ Haus
No Sense
[Clone Jack for Daze]
4 tracks of kinda retro-house rave from Rotterdam with a couple of remixes from Legowelt and Vin Sol. The DJ Haus “In the Body, Acid Dub” mix is the one for me though. Slamming acid and stomping groove with a stuttered vocal sample that jacks super hard. The vinyl is nicely cut and mastered too, loud and clear for full on dancefloor damage.

Karen Gwyer
Bouloman
[Nous]
“Keisa Kizzy Kinte” is an amazing track that is part drone art weirdness and part deep techno for the early hours. It starts with atonal and shifting chords before slowly morphing into throbbing undulation and crisp and shifting percussive elements at 124bpm. An epic 9-minute hardware work out that manages to combine experimental tonal exploration with dark funk and groove.

Dr. Walker vs. Omsk Information/St. Tétik ‎
[Subsonic 003]
Under the radar, new label from Berlin, mixing up the genres and keeping it low and undercover with each release encompassing a variety of artists. The A-side and killer stand out track for me here is an immense 10-minute modular madness collaboration from veteran acid disturber Walker and more recent producer Omsk. The tune slowly careers, turns and builds into a frenzy of analogue tones and frequency manipulation that is almost psychedelic as it takes the listener deep into the heart of the machines.

Black Mass Plastics
Under the Radar
[Ugly Funk UFU009]
Off kilter funk from Black Mass over 8 booming new tracks straight from his audio research laboratory. Doom and bass infect the slamming grooves and make this an essential purchase for those who like their beats disturbed. The key tones on these tunes emanate from an array of handmade modules designed and built by the artist himself. These machines are designed to cause maximum audio damage and indeed take no prisoners as they take centre stage and help form his unique sound. This is music that defies easy description or analysis but is not aimed at a mythological past. These are tunes for the present and beyond. Gloomy future dance floor classics.

Jago
I’m Going to Go
[Dark Entries Editions]
Expansives
Life With You
[Dark Entries Editions]
I’ve got to admit I have a love/hate relationship with most Italo-Disco. Some of it is legitimately the cheesiest pop-dance nonsense ever committed to vinyl. Some releases though are not just guilty pleasures but bona fide early electronic dance classics. In fact, this music still deeply resonates from my initial forays onto the dance floor of underground clubs back in the early eighties. A time before House and Techno had appeared, and when the electronic music that I heard the DJ’s mixing was mostly European.
Dark Entries from San Francisco normally re-release super serious rare and obscure industrial and dark wave. On the Editions series though they specialise in unearthing Italo dance rarities. Beautifully packaged, these records are presented in vibrant pastel sleeves and even include an insert card with the lyrics printed on. Perfect for those early morning karaoke sessions after a night drinking Campari and Aperol. The two tunes I list here are particular favourites. Jago is stripped back electro funk proto house with a proper pop jaunt and swagger. For the spotters they include the rare Frankie Knuckles mix but I prefer the vocal original and sometimes you do need to dance to lyrics such as:

“I like listening to the drop falling from the tap, when I think of you,
and since the drop falling makes me feel bad, I prefer not to think of you.
I’m going to go
Are you going to sing or talk?
I’m going to go
Are you going to go or stay?”

The Expansives tune is a lot more sparkly. It features an amazing bass line, super sweet chords and excessively sugary melodies whilst at key points a vocoder replies in response to the overly angst ridden vocals. The desperation in the voice is slightly at odds with the up-tempo arrangement. Italo is always at least slightly camp. The arrangement here is also particularly odd in places but this only just adds to the weird mutated pop aesthetic.

Waffles (001, 002, 003, 004)
Great new edit imprint from Belgium that only features colour pictures of tempting assorted waffles on the label and no other info. Four releases so far and pretty much all are consistently excellent deep and spacey afro disco re-works. My overall favourites though are the chocolate and coffee waffles, 001 and 003 respectively.

Three of You/*MM‎
Drum Electronic Sound
[Bio Rhythm]
Drum Electronic Sound (Paul Du Lac Edit) is my favourite cut on here. A stomp and chug industrial funk groove with some heavy reverb claps propelling the beat. Subtle percussion and flange on the edit help the rhythm pump and snarl nicely.

Powder
Spray
[Born Free]
4 soothing and rolling repetitive house influenced tracks from Tokyo based artist Powder aka Moko Shibata. The tunes here all feature beautifully crafted slow and intricate polyrhythms that both hypnotise and mesmerise in equal quantities. This is electronic music that feels very Japanese in its minimal beauty and cut down aesthetic. Raw and seemingly simple these tracks have a dreamlike quality controlled by the rolling bass, synth pulses and subtle flecks of percussion.

Silent Servant
Hypnosis in the modern age Volume 2
[L.I.E.S.]
Dark and moody techno repetition from Silent Servant with a touch of 80’s EBM thrown in the mix. Pure dark room chug and throb.

Cliff Lothar
Old Jams Die Hard #1
[Riverette]
4 tracker on the Riverette label from Madrid. Going Dutch is the tune I play. Fucked up distorto house with a gully bassline and a classic stuttered vocal as the groove kicks back in. Proper jackin.

Pluton and Humanoids
World Invaders
[V.S. Records]
Amazing cosmic space disco obscurity from 1981 that was originally released on a small Québécois label in very limited quantities. This tune genuinely feels unearthly and unlike any of its peers from this period. Melancholy synths float over a chugging metallic disco groove whilst ghostly vocoders warn of aliens watching humanity. The final section features an epic if slightly disturbing key change as synths and alien choir ride a clattering groove that collapses at the end. This was repressed a couple of years ago in Berlin, I found my copy in a flea market there, but even these versions are going up and are hard to find cheap. If nothing else, fans of obscure weird cosmic space disco should check out the audio online.

Aigbe Lebarty – Unity [PMG]
Blo – Back in Time [PMG]
Aleke Kanonu meets Tolbert the Miracle Man Nwanne, Nwanne, Nwanne [PMG]
In the last reviews I did for Datacide I hyped the amazing re-issue
of Nana Love and her Disco Documentary Full of Funk LP, the sound of Ghana meets Harlesden in an after hours disco. If you haven’t
picked that up yet then seriously get on it ASAP The past few years have seen a host of other obscure Afro funk hitting the shelves and here are some more three figure rarities to add to your collection for a fraction of the Discogs price.
Unity by Aigbe Lebarty was inspired by Anita Ward’s ‘Ring your Bell’ but is way more funky and urgent, also how can you argue with it’s credentials when the backing singers are called the ”Sex Bombers”!!
Blo’s “Back in Time” is smooth and funky on the A-side but it’s the burning Nigerian disco heat of “Dance in Circle” that is the fire here.
Nwanne, Nwanne, Nwanne is an insane and hyper fast latin infused afrobeat track that features a mental drum workout from Nigerian percussionist Aleke Kanonu. Incidentally this was originally released on the same cult label, Rojac records from New York, run by local gangster Jack Taylor, that put out some highly sought after first generation hip hop from rappers at the legendary Harlem World venue.

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-controlled-weirdness/feed/0Datacide 16 Record Reviews by Low Entropyhttp://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-low-entropy/
http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-low-entropy/#respondWed, 07 Jun 2017 09:09:56 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=465814anger & Dep Affect Evasive Crapspeak EP [Badmouth003] 14anger is Clément Perez, who is far from being an unknown man of the french hard electronic scene, known for his contributions to the now defunct magazine Signal Zero for example. This is less about his Hardcore roots, but violent Hard Techno. He teams up with Travis […]]]>

14anger & Dep Affect
Evasive Crapspeak EP
[Badmouth003]
14anger is Clément Perez, who is far from being an unknown man of the french hard electronic scene, known for his contributions to the now defunct magazine Signal Zero for example.
This is less about his Hardcore roots, but violent Hard Techno. He teams up with Travis Evans aka Dep Affect for this release.
The first track, Evasive Crapspeak, definitely digs up some french memories, think of some of the works by Laurent Hô or Manu Le Malin for example.
Followed by a remix by Dep Affect, which puts his own spin to this tune, a bit of extra aggression.
Prayers To Broken Stones is less frontal, but more hypnotic instead. The EP ends on Jericho, my favorite pick of this release, an all-out assault on the nerves via bassdrums and noize.

Umwelt
Days Of Dissent
[BOIDAE 001]
Umwelt is a project that was started in the 90s already, but as far as i know it was not until recent years he really appeared from ‘under the surface’.
My sources also tell me most of his tracks are one-shot affairs, arranged and recorded life during sessions of sonic experientation (could this be true?).
At first glimpse an electro affair, what sticks out for my is the very dark atmosphere, many times riddled with future themed samples, and especially a very strong melody work of compositions that is often – to me – lacking even with most of his peers.
Although he probably comes from a way different background, there are similiarities to the works of Somatic Responses or Fischkopf (Lasse Steen) for me to be found here.
My personal favorite picks on this album include Company Of Lies, a truly distorted, menacing beat+synth workout and the title track Days Of Dissent itself, a kind of a dystopic beatboy breakdown vision.
With tracks like World Shatters, a 4/4 workout, he shows he can step out of his producer ‘comfort zone’ too.
Generally, if you like dark soundscapes, or well-produced and above all smart electronics, this might be worth a listen.

Vinzenz Raindeer
Warteschleifmaschine
[Self-Released]

I almost know nothing about this project; Jean Bach mentioned it, and i had to check it out. And it is definitely comparable – if it is comparable – to the releases of the Jean Bach label family.
Odd german singing with minimal and experimental electronic, somewhere between mock schlager, lofi trash electronics and minimal grooves. But never coming up as pretentious or lost-in-meaninglessness as so many of the “electronic self-ironic” projects possess (a plague in germany).
My pick on this record is 99 Runden Im Clownsauto, a song about, well, driving 99 laps in a clown car.

Casketkrusher & The Manipulator
Power Up
[TOTAL 021]
Artists are looking back to the early techno and house sounds; and while most go rather for the more intelligent and “industrial” releases of the 90s, there is also a resurgent interest in, well, brutally honest rave sounds.
Casketcrusher is the main man in this phenomena, combining everything from oldschool breakbeat stacks to 909 gabber affairs.
If both genres never interested you at all; well i guess it’s not your cup of tea then. but i think with a bit of ironic intent and one or two smiles, this is definitely listenable, and if you missed all this strange rave oddness of other days, give it a try.

]]>http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-low-entropy/feed/0Datacide 16 Record Reviews by Zombieflesheaterhttp://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-zombieflesheater/
http://datacide-magazine.com/datacide-16-record-reviews-by-zombieflesheater/#commentsTue, 23 May 2017 10:58:47 +0000http://datacide-magazine.com/?p=4645Honey Disco 1-4 Honey Disco is a label from Canada that releases single-sided, clear 7” vinyls with beewax on the flipside and honey smell included.The first two releases by Hristo and Koosh contain some cool funkedelic disco-dub. Number three By Eddie C was my favorite so far, with a dubby downtempo tune that reminds me […]]]>

Honey Disco 1-4
Honey Disco is a label from Canada that releases single-sided, clear 7” vinyls with beewax on the flipside and honey smell included.The first two releases by Hristo and Koosh contain some cool funkedelic disco-dub. Number three By Eddie C was my favorite so far, with a dubby downtempo tune that reminds me slightly of T.Rex’ “Hot Love“. I heard number four by Osmose recently, wich works in a similar way, re-working Billy Idols “Sweet Sixteen”.

Myler
Gorilla Biscuits
[Pennyroyal] Myler Northern Extension [EarToGround Records]
Irish producer Myler with 3 tight and rumbling techno tracks, released in 2014 on Untolds Pennyroyal label, soundwise somewhere between JoeFarr, J. Tjin and Randomer with those thick bassdrums and a certain funkiness that all of them have in common. The other record came out in ocbtober 2016 with 4 tracks and a locked groove on vinyl and one good digital bonus track that goes in direction of the pennyroyal material. A1 is shuffling breakbeat techno, quite ok. A2 and AA2 are more or less solid techno tracks but the real gem is the AA1 track “D’Electrocution” which is raw, straight forward basement techno with an intriguing filtered piano. Opinions might differ about this, but for me it totally works.

Ossia
Control
[Berceuse Heroique]Outstanding double 12” by Ossia on british label Berceuse Heroique with 4 hypnotic long tracks between minimalistic dancehall, dub and techno a la Powell or Blawan, plus a big fold-out poster on heavy paper in a full printed sleeve. I am not sure, but might have been a good idea to put the versions on the respectively other plate, so it would be possible to mix the Originals with their versions. Nevertheless a great addictive sound that will make you flip the records over and over.

Genghis/C_C – Split EP
[Small But Hard]
Gorgonn was previously part of Dokkebi Q and Devilman and on this split cassette with C_C comes his first solo output under the Genghis moniker. Gruff, distorted beats with traces of dubstep and experimental hip hop. C_C dug up some older tracks in his unique harsh tape & feedback, industrial breaks style. Comes nicely packed in a printed cardboard box with artwork by label co-founder Simon Fowler.

Black Seed
Logical Consequence EP
[Details Sound]
Most of the releases on this label contain a heavy paper sheet with the infos on one side and a humans portrait on the other side. I am not sure if there is more than just the exotic aesthetics behind those pictures of people from different ethnic groups. The music on this black label vinyl is nice, slow and grinding hardware techno… nightmarish… industrial house? 300 copies.

Various – Where It All BeganVarious – Wild By Nature
[Phat Bubba Records]
The first two releases of that new strictly vinyl jungle label from Plymouth . Both 12″ are 4 trackers with massive “new oldschool” from Percussive P, Kid Lib, Bazia, Dwarde, Sonars Ghost and Tim Reaper. Amazing how they manage to transport this fat, rolling oldschool feeling into fresh new tunes without sounding outdated or artifical. You can really hear the passion and fun they had while making the tracks.

Various
Black Carpet 001
[Black Carpet]
A 4 track 12″ on this new label from the Netherlands with bold and hard techno by Ontal, Honzo, Ayarcana, and Stingray, whose track is my favorite with hectic rattling percussions and screeching noises. This is one of the better releases in the recent industrial techno wave and if the machines ever rise they will keep them as minstrel slaves, i am sure.

Oppositaer
Exarchia EP
Nice 6 track digital release from Berlin based Oppositaer aka Ari Nev from Concrete Cosmos. Uneven improvised breakcore with a dirty basement feeling, that
reminds me on some of the best Trash Tapes material. It is dedicated to and inspired by the anarchist uprising in Greece and available for free at archive.org.

Various
V – 5 Years Of Artefacts
Chapter Four
[Stroboscopic Artefacts]
My favorite tune on this 4-tracker is the one from Jonas Kopp, a long mesmeric techno thing that could go on for ever. Dadubs track starts as dark slow motion experimental hiphop inna Mille Plateaux style and merges into some faster trip hop like rhythms. Eomac sounds like gloomy autumn or a dramatic b/w parfume commercial, must be the strings. And finally Chevel with a IDMish break thing where the synths are a bit too soft. Diverse package for different situations.

KK Null
Machine In The Ghost
[Dry Lungs Records, Hirntrust Grind Media] 6.R.M.E
ANRSE
[Hirntrust Grind Media]
Another two 7 inch vinyls on the prolific Hirntrust label. Number 41 – “Machine In The Ghost”, in collaboration with Dry Lungs Records, from Japanese noise veteran KK Null with speedcorish industrial rhythmic noise, exploring new territories. Number 42 from french producer 6.R.M.E are distorted and deconstructed, slow broken beats, kind of industrial hip hop. Both in a run of 300 copies with picture sleeves. Excellent as always.

Wah Wah
No Borders
[Kool Killer Records]
Kool Killer Records is a new multi-style label, founded by Dj Schleppscheisse in Berlin and the first 10″ release contains two solid acid techno tracks by scene veterans Wah Wah aka Brandon Spivey & Richie Anderson. It comes in an edition of 300 copies, with a nicely designed 3 color riso printed cardboard cover.

BLÆRG/Low Entropy
WTF Is It?
[Tri-P Records]
Two hyper-edited IDMish tracks by BLÆRG, made with Audiomulch, an unusual equipment and approach, wich makes it a bit more authentic and personal than the current run-of-the-mill “breakcore”. But the Genesis sample is a real “wtf is it and why?” moment. On the other side Low Entropy hands over 3 tracks of broken beat hardcore and chip tunes with a good portion of disortion, in the way of his early material. Overall a solid record, Patrick Bateman approved.

C Mantle
1996 EP
[Obscuur Records]
The man of many styles delivers a massive techno ep for the dutch netlabel Obscuur Records. Its a homage to his favorite techno sounds and the mid-late 90s Edinburgh techno scene and so you get 5 diverse tracks between variations of club techno and broken beats plus 4 remixes from Swarm Intelligence, Kill Ref and Ingen.

B-Ball Joints
Untitled
[Dog In The Night Records]
One of the strangest records i purchased in the last year and one of my favorites. B-ball Joints is Low Jack who released on labels like Trilogy Tapes and L.I.E.S., if you are familiar with that you see wich direction it takes, just a bit weirder. The A side tracks could’ve been released on Reverse Records, monotonous minimalistic “speedcore” mixed with lo-fi noises wich surprised me as i ordered it for my favorite track on the B side, an odd lo-fi breaky house (?) track full of disorted screams. The last one is a beatless outro, the sound of a radio on short wave rebuild with music equipment…

Violet Poison
Absence Generator
[Veleno Viola]
Black Tears
The Long Decline
[Veleno Viola]
Veleno Viola is the successor of Violet Poison Records with a similar sound between experimental techno and industrial noise. 5 slow stomping and droning tracks on Absence Generator while The Long Decline has 11 tracks of less agonising murky broken techno on double 12″. Each release on white marbled vinyl in nice printed sleeves, giving it an classy touch. Well crafted apocalyptic soundscapes for a crestfallen techno youth that, for my taste, could risk a bit more sometimes. I give them 7 tortured souls out of 10.

Shed
Constant Power
[The Final Experiment]
Very british sounding breakbeat techno on side A and some more broken compositions on side B. Best track is B 3, hard industrial broken beats in AFX style and without the friendly synth pads that water down the other tracks a bit. But overall a solid release on this hardwax imprint.

Shapednoise
Different Selves
[Type]
The picture of an endless, grey city in fog/smog on the full print sleeve sets the tone for the nine tracks on this LP. The first track features Justin Broadrick and reminds on the bleakest 90s techstep minus the beats and from there it just gets darker. Harsh scraping noises and decaying industrial beats imbedded in an atmosphere of hostility and deadness. Shapednoise made the appeal of negative power audible. Stunning release.

Whirling Hall Of Knives
Arc Molt EP
[Candela Rising]
Four tracks of grinding and jarring techno and rhythmic noise, including a remix by the duo Talker, who have good 12″s out on Downwards. If Frank Henenlotter made a movie about club techno, this would be the technos evil twin brother hidden in the basket case.

Honzo
das Unheimliche
[Haunter Records] Cage Suburbia
Argument #03
[Haunter Records]
Weightausend
Meet Your Doom! (Green Death) [Haunter Records]
Haunter Records from Milan release an interesting mix of industrial techno, breakbeats, dark ambient. D. Carbone from Berlin, the pretty active man behind different projects and labels, under his Honzo moniker with 5 tracks of analog sounding, mostly broken beats over mesmerizing melodies and eerie sounds. The Cage Suburbia 12″ was the first one that caught my attention with its distorted analog techno-breakbeat hardcore mixture, the political message it transports and a bold visualization. The latest release on the label from Weightausend who is also part of Cage Suburbia and Heith with dark ambience, unformatted breakbeats and a gloomy Christoph De Babalon remix in screen printed paper sleeve.

BATTLE BREAK – BATTLE BREAK
[PRR! PRR!]
Freaks at work on this french 12″. Low Jack opens the record with his bawling low jackness, Bischepiehls (Jean Bach) forwards the annual dancemix. DJ Dee Kay is unknown to me but the short track sounds like a mix of the previous names. Trio Venderstrooik end side A with their very own vocal-house-inna-nigerian-karaoke-style. Evil Grimace opens Side B with a gæbber/wodka tune, followed by an cut-up interlude from Tough! aka label honchos Cloarec & Coquelin, a slab of slow techno spiked with lols by L.A.A.M and finally the battle brawl collage to make the confusion complete. Questions have to be asked.

Silver Waves
Ep3
[Portal Editions/ Howling Owl Records]
By all the assumptions about wether breakcore is dead, resurrected, a fart joke or never gone, its clear that the relevant music sometimes happens outside of the established and often boring & bored circles. I don’t know what the background of this artist is or if he considers those tracks being breakcore, but for me, this release is definitly more bc than most of the stuff in the current “scene” and funny enough it happens outside of this scene and coincidentally in the surrounding of music I reached out to in recent years, that has a similar energy and adventurousness to me as the b-core I like. Side A starts with a 12 minutes track of harsh noises, bass and rapid fire beats, reminding me on Noize Creator’s 12″ on Praxis, dark and menacing. The second track on that side plays even more with broken beats and distortion, clocking in at 8 and a half minutes, and has a more industrial sounding aproach. On the other side of the plate we have a superb remix by Ossia, like Silver Waves, from Bristol, in the vein of his double 12″ on Berceuse Heroique, extremly compelling, dubby deconstructions. The last one is by a project called Giant Swan with trudging industrial and variations of the noises from the original.

Jöte Gubien
NULLRIOT.
[Flop Beat Disk]
Transparent 7″ in DIY Artwork, with nine tracks that sound like one consecutive track on each side. Jean Bach is behind that and so you get his unique abradant “fundustrial” (i made this one up, sorry) with found nonsense samples and askew beats. Definitly no Quaddeljazz on this release. Good music from idealists for the interested.

Nplgnn
Sigma Tau [Where To Now?] Nplgnn
1925 [Okno]
Both 12 inches contain broken beat lo-fi techno in the vein of Low Jack or Rezzett, maybe the best you can get out of the limited possibilities of a Korg Electribe. My favorite track is the brutish distorted “Ravers Are Still Living” from the Okno release. Flimmering Beach feeling , till you see the sewer pipe leaking into the ocean, something like that.

Rancid Opera
Azionismo Bolognese In Rap
[- Belligeranza]
DJ Ballis latest concept sees an 12″ output on Sonic Belligeranzas sublabel. 4 Tracks of gory and aggressive horrorcore styled hip hop in italian language, opera samples and irreverent references to the prestigious 3 tenors. The english translation of the lyrics is printed on the inner sleeve. Not for the faint hearted.

Various
A Different Point Of View EP [Self Reflektion]
4-track 12″ released in late 2015 on techno label Self Reflektion from Rotterdam. The Logotech track is a bit to soft for my taste but the tracks by Hiroaki Iizuka & Remco Beekwilder are nice straight and uplifing bangers, especially “The Circle”. Lenson ends the record with a slow, hard pounding acid track. Very functional in a very good way.

Delien
Identity Annex
[Detroit Industrial/Void]
The Duo Delien seems to be active for over 15 years, I think the only other release i knew so far was the really good Low Res 12” from 2004. Here we have a four-track cassette/ digital release on the detroit based labels Void and Detroit Industrial,out since november 2015. 2 really long and two shorter tracks of raw electro, industrial broken beats and breakcore. Brutally funky.

Naturkunde Museum Ostkreuz
Tropycaliptic Excursions
[The Death Of Rave]
Sam Kidel
Disruptive Muzak
[The Death Of Rave]
Boomkat puts out some very diverse and good records on this sublabel. NMO here come with 3 awsome variations of quirky marching band techno on blue or black vinyl, that would also fit on Hemlock. Disruptive Muzak is an interesting concept album that contains 2x 20 minutes of music designed after the background muzak in shopping centers and businesses or telephone queues, diffuse and hypnotic, just a bit less predictable and more disruptive than the original muzak. This muzak was played to call center employees instead of a voice. The recording of this was arranged into the track you can hear on one side. on the other side you have the clean composition do listen or making your diy version. This comes on clear or black vinyl. Hello-o?

Les Neiges Noires De Laponie Frozen Relics
[Plasma Vortex Frequency]
Les Neiges Noires De Laponie Olmmai
[Angstprod]
Those releases hit hard. Frozen Relics with 4 tracks of experimental speedcore, noise and breakcore on white vinyl, limited to 100 copies, genres attached to the track names on the full printed cover, to have that straight. It came out short after the 11 track LNNDL CD “Olmmai”. Both releases are good and interesting just that at some point you have the feeling with the splintered beats and glitches all over the place that the tracks go nowhere. Thats not necessarily something bad, it can also work as a relaxing metallic sound shower, but especially when played in a mix at a party, it lacks a bit of a clearer build up. My favorite seems to be the breakcore track “Anoba” which is on both releases.
Chilly permafrost electronics.

Various – Waschmaschinenfest 2K16
[Limbs]
The notorious Waschmaschinenfest goes into the third round with even more music this time on a C 60 cassette on Raketenbasis Haberlandstraße sublabel Limbs. The specially packed tape contains 19 multistyle compositions of washing machine sounds by DJ Coquelin, NEIN., Philipp Münch, Toddy Baldischwylah, aehm, Annihilation Operator, Jandlsepp, defaults and a lot more. Matmos came late to the game, laundry is punk!

Perc
Ma
[Stroboscopic Artefacts]
On the A side are two cold monotone 4/4 techno tracks with clanging industrial percussions, nice but too repetitive. Its all about the title track on the B side wich stretches over 12 minutes, also following that formula with industrial sounds, almost a version of the two other tracks, but stays in a broken beat structure, reminding me on Photek, Noize Creator and Perplex Barquettes. Great desolation in sound.

Zombieflesheater
Bloodsport Soundclash EP
[Kritik Am Leben/ Flop Beat Disk]
Grindmaster Flesh
Schädelfrost
[ThirdTypeTapes] Annihilation Operator
Bludgeon
[Raketenbasis Haberlandstraße]
I had a good run this year and released those three releases on different labels.
Bloodsport Soundclash is a 12″ Ep that has 4 tracks from the 8 track Alarm tape that came out exactly one year before, plus one exclusive track. i always had the plan to put those out on vinyl and i teamed up with Minor/Flop Beat Disk for that. (Un)typical ZFE sound from 2000-2016, limited to 150 copies. The Grindmaster cassette was in the making for some time but finally saw the light in april 2016 on the always great ThirdTypeTapes with the iconic artwork of forgotten 80s tape designs. 14 tracks of chewy no-fi and stressful distortion against the delusion of clean perfection. 75 copies. And finally the Bludgeon tape on RH, a weird “monophonic beats vs. odd samples” experiment with a good portion of humour. 14 tracks, 40 copies.
I would totally buy them!